ESPN’s Dan Rafael reports the ratings for HBO Boxing this past Saturday night which featured heavyweights Luis Ortiz and Bryant Jennings.
The event averaged 616,000 subscribers and peaked at 735,000 per Nielsen. Ortiz KO’d Jennings for the win. The opening bout on the telecast featured Nicholas Walters taking on Jason Sosa. The event average 373,000 peaking at 473,000. Despite what many believed a win by Walters, the fight was ruled a draw.
Per ESPN, HBO’s “Boxing After Dark” series this year averaged 730,000 HBO subscribers which is slightly lower than the 766,000 viewers it drew last year. But, as pointed out by ESPN, HBO’s “World Championship Boxing” was up 10 percent as it averaged 1.3 million viewers per card.
Payout Perspective:
The ratings for BAD are down but overall you might argue that Boxing viewership is up on HBO with its flagship series scoring an average of 1.3 million viewers with some very good matchups this year. If there is anything that you might attribute to this year’s BAD decline it might be PBC on a variety of networks which has numbed many to boxing cards on television.
More bad ratings for boxing. Nothing new. It is clearly on a gradual decline with managers making desperate attempts to rescue it with massive financial losses like PBC. Once Mayweather went, the sport took a massive dive in terms of mainstream appeal and of course ratings/ppv.
King kong is an exciting new hw,but has ped issues before….but him,anthony joshua and parker are the up and coming exciting hw’s….wilder,fury,are already there(stivern,briggs,chisora entertaining opponents)…hw boxing hasnt had this exciting of fighters for years now….
What were the final ratings for last weeks PBC on NBC card and this past fridays SPike tv card?
No stories on those ratings? I know PBC card on NBC overnights were 1.8 mill but never saw final numbers.
As for this card its more a prospect card, BAD series, no big names, bout what you’d expect this card to do on a Sat with UFC and Football on.
d will you plz stfu already? 735K viewers on cable TV isn’t bad at all!
Bellator has approximately the same viewership.
…….and hw boxing is still in the toilet and can’t promote a ppv in the US.
Hbo has ggg,kovalev,canelo,donaire new ones kingkong,walters
Showtime has wilder,chaves jr,khan,…
pbc diff channels garcia,broner,spence,thurman,porter,danny jacobs,kid chocolate,david haye
roc nation cotto, ward hbo
Tyson fury,anthony joshua
In a year or two there would be a LOT of boxing stars
Before only a handful get exposure on hbo and showtime now it doubled or even tripled
There could not be a bigger contrast between Jennings-Ortiz and Klitschko-Fury. I wish nothing but the best for both Jennings and Ortiz. They are true warriors and put on one of the best HW fights I’ve seen in a long time.
I wish the ratings had been higher, but then Ortiz doesn’t speak English worth a damn and Jennings is frankly mediocre – the fact that he went the distance with Klitschko says more about Klitschko (may he never regain his titles). I think Otiz has a lot of upside, but we’ll see how marketable he becomes.
“In a year or two there would be a LOT of boxing stars
Before only a handful get exposure on hbo and showtime now it doubled or even tripled”
All of these guys have been around for a while and none of them are turning into stars. The only one that has a shot is GGG, but the issue is everyone is avoiding him and he is 33.
And again, hw boxing has been in the gutter for over a decade now and will remain that way. They don’t have anyone to promote in the US. No one can sell a ppv.
I didn’t know that averaging 10% higher than last year is a gradual decline…nice math D.
Luis Ortiz, 24-0, pro debut was only 5 years ago and hes 36 years old. So no he hasn’t been around for that long at all and Jennings is his first notable name. Good viewership for an unknown.
“I didn’t know that averaging 10% higher than last year is a gradual decline…nice math D.”
Fiction can be fun, but I find the reference section a lot more enlightening.
-Ace Ventura
“Luis Ortiz, 24-0, pro debut was only 5 years ago and hes 36 years old. So no he hasn’t been around for that long at all and Jennings is his first notable name. Good viewership for an unknown.”
Follow the conversation, I wasn’t responding about Ortiz, genius. Regardless though, he will never be a ppv star, not even close.
The difference before and after pbc is just double or triple the exposure for up and coming boxers….and more number of boxers at that….ex…errol spence show him in diff networks gain familiarity to viewers then do the more specific traditional hype special on hbo or showtime,or on other networks as well
140 to 147 division is stacked…pacman,marquez,danny garcia,broner,khan,kell brook,mattyse,maidana,bradley, …up and coming spence and crawford,postol,…old guys with names malinaggi,judah…brandon rios.
..with pbc, guys who lost to the divisions elite are given a chance to still continue with theyre careers and even given another chance for a title if they continue to win..it benefits not just up and coming boxers
Thurman,guerero,algieri
Yet PBC has done nothing in reality other than lose hundreds of millions from a hedge fund. Haymon will never be able to borrow a dollar after this monstrous failure.
Good luck with boxing ppv in the future. Haha.
Hahaha pbc has been on 8 months? Yet it has been talked about by a lot of people kn the media..how many years before ufc got big?…give pbc 1 or 2 years of this and a lot of name fighters will emerge….
Haymon and the investors have stated even before the first event that this was a long term venture and that it would lose money in the beginning before finding its place.
We all knew they weren’t going to do 30M viewers a show when they have shows scattered through 10 channels and are on quite frequent.
The bigger stars only fight 2-4 times a year, and with so many fighters, it could only make sense that people like #150 Danny O’Connor vs #60Garbriel Bracero aren’t going to bring in the big ratings.
Imagine Alex White vs Alan Omer would do as the headliner on a UFC card on FS1 or FOX. People would say who? and they are ranked higher in the UFC than O’Connor and Bracero are in boxing.
I heard schafer is going to mayweather promotions….this pbc,tmt are promoting in many areas.ex ashley T. (tmt) never heard of that boxer but broner mentioned him with kaitlyn jenner on showtime then they talked trash on fighthype then on social media and tmz…now there is some awareness on this boxer..if it was in the 80’s and the 90’s this boxer would still be unknown
“Hahaha pbc has been on 8 months? Yet it has been talked about by a lot of people kn the media..how many years before ufc got big?…give pbc 1 or 2 years of this and a lot of name fighters will emerge….”
The UFC is a completely different business model. And as you guys love to point out, do not pay nearly as much to the fighters as PBC did, not to mention outside the purses the overhead for PBC is higher with a number of costs-like paying a promoter to put their name on the promotion in a puppet scheme, plus a variety of other bad ideas.
The UFC also started out with triple the ratings PBC did, have consistently drawn better ratings than them, notably in the 18-49 demo and PBC has clearly declined ratings wise, with no clear strategy to change the shrinking ratings. This is an unsustainable business model and any objective person sees the writing on the wall. Bellator outdraws PBC on Spike with a fraction of the production costs.
Promotions do not pay 500m in 2 years just for exposure for ppv stars. They are attempting to make this work by itself and it is failing miserably.
“Haymon and the investors have stated even before the first event that this was a long term venture and that it would lose money in the beginning before finding its place.
We all knew they weren’t going to do 30M viewers a show when they have shows scattered through 10 channels and are on quite frequent.”
After 10 months, they are starting to realize how unsustainable this is and they absolutely expected better ratings than they are doing. They have to increase their ratings at least for their big shows on NBC which is what sells the league and they can’t. Even when they put all of their big guns on a card, they still weren’t drawing the ratings they needed to sustain this. They need to be averaging probably at least 5m+ viewers in order to sustain those big cards like they had on their debut, and they can’t get anywhere near that.
“The bigger stars only fight 2-4 times a year, and with so many fighters, it could only make sense that people like #150 Danny O’Connor vs #60Garbriel Bracero aren’t going to bring in the big ratings.
Imagine Alex White vs Alan Omer would do as the headliner on a UFC card on FS1 or FOX. People would say who? and they are ranked higher in the UFC than O’Connor and Bracero are in boxing.”
Yet PBC has used top 10 boxers who have done less ratings than no name Bellator headliners on Spike.
Pbc is starting its bizz model in a sport that just got the highest record ppv….investing in an already established sport….i keep saying give it 2 years….turns out its a 3 to 4 year plan according to pbc…
What boxing needs is a good analyst who is good in adjectives(joe rogan minus 50% of bullshit hahaha..but give credit to where credit is due he describes detailed moves in a marketing way)……if its a boring ground game he’ll say “Highly technical” ” world class jujitsu”..rockholds kicks ” the dexterity of his kicks”….on shannon briggs” the fluidity of his body shot from a 1-2 hahahaha
“Pbc is starting its bizz model in a sport that just got the highest record ppv….investing in an already established sport….i keep saying give it 2 years….turns out its a 3 to 4 year plan according to pbc…”
Hahaha. When will they learn?? Floyd Mayweather was not reflective of the rest of boxing. He was arguably the biggest draw in the history of the sport and helped inform the general public of how boring boxing can be. That fight buried the sport, and now Mayweather also retired where there is no more major draws in boxing like Mayweather or Pac in his prime.
It’s been ten months and PBC has proven that it is a failure and is doomed to burn through every penny they are investing. Why on Earth would their ratings dramatically change? There is no reason to believe that. They’ve declined. PBC can say whatever they want, if the hedge fund isn’t willing to continue flushing money down the drain, they can pull it. They’ve already burned through 200m. 2-3m ratings per network prime time show isn’t going to cut it, when you have purses in the 6-7m range, your gates are total garbage, and you have to pay a promoter to put their name on it, it is not financially sustainable.
After 2 years…3 or 4 accdng to pbc…a LOT of name fighters will emerge….even if pbc folds up(worse case scenario) name fighters will continue to fight,and make ppv. Like pride and strikeforce fighters.
…ufc spent tons of money (loan due).pride spent money to develop and create fighters….now theres no more pride spending,no more stikeforce spending
http://www.boxingscene.com/al-haymon-pbc-target-tv-invasion-uk–97588….pbc uk! hahaha
“After 2 years…3 or 4 accdng to pbc…a LOT of name fighters will emerge….even if pbc folds up(worse case scenario) name fighters will continue to fight,and make ppv. Like pride and strikeforce fighters.”
PBC was not expecting to turn this into a ppv platform. It was strictly tv. And sourcing PBC as evidence for how their success will unfold is the same as accepting all those defunct mma companies where they saw themselves a few years into the future(before they of course imploded). Only difference is companies like Strikeforce and Affliction only lost tens of millions where PBC has already lost hundreds.
“…ufc spent tons of money (loan due).pride spent money to develop and create fighters….now theres no more pride spending,no more stikeforce spending”
Hahaha. And…….????? They received all of those fighter’s contracts. Rockhold, Overeem, Henderson, etc. The UFC makes hundreds of millions per year, the PBC LOSES hundreds of millions per year. See the difference? HAHAHA!
“http://www.boxingscene.com/al-haymon-pbc-target-tv-invasion-uk–97588”
They are already fleeing to the UK. HAHAHA!!! Pennies on the dollar without the US market. HAHAHAHA!!!