Is Pacquiao not drawing fans anymore? The numbers for the Pacquiao/Rios fight are coming in and they do not look good at all. While there may be a reason for the low PPV buys, it def. does not compare to Pac’s prior fights. While I did watch it, I know the hype for the fight wasn’t very high. Check out the numbers & let us know what you think…
Via ESPN:
The return of welterweight star Manny Pacquiao, who outpointed former lightweight titlist Brandon Rios in a lopsided decision on Nov. 23 in Macau, China, generated in the neighborhood of 500,000 pay-per-view buys, Top Rank promoter Bob Arum told ESPN.com on Wednesday.
“The numbers are coming in like we expected,” Arum said. “There was a little delay because of Thanksgiving, but it will be somewhere in the area of 500,000 buys. We ran all our numbers on something a little less than 500,000 but figuring we’d do around 500,000, and that’s what we’re going to wind up doing. It means 490,000 or 510,000, something like that.”
The fight, the first HBO PPV card ever done outside the United States, generated approximately $30 million in domestic pay-per-view revenue. However, there are some in the boxing industry who claim the fight didn’t crack 400,000 buys.
Arum and HBO executives knew when they made the fight that having it in China would hurt the American PPV numbers.
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Still, the pay-per-view total paled in comparison to Pacquiao’s previous fight in December 2012. That fight, his fourth with rival Juan Manuel Marquez, generated 1.15 million PPV buys. Pacquiao got knocked out cold at the end of the sixth round and took a year off before returning to face Rios.
(Story Continues…)
