« Monday afternoon chalkboard (12/17/07) | Home | Updated K-1 12/31 Osaka Dome card (as of 12/18) »
Spin doctoring the Mayweather-Hatton PPV buyrate number
By Zach Arnold | December 17, 2007
Do a search on Google News right now for the Mayweather vs. Hatton PPV buy rate number and you’ll see a litany of boxing sites doing a hard sell for the buyrate number the 12/8 event drew (a reported 850,000 buys). “Massive PPV numbers released” was the headline at Doghouse Boxing.
These sites must think that their readers have short memories.
Throughout the hype sessions leading up to the December 8th HBO PPV, Oscar De La Hoya (promoter for the event) claimed that business for the match was at a 60% pace compared to the 5/5/07 fight between De La Hoya and Mayweather.
Look no further than a recent column Kevin Iole wrote on Yahoo Sports:
What he’s most pleased with, though, is that the fight will generate significant business. De La Hoya and Golden Boy CEO Richard Schaefer are adamant that the pay-per-view will surpass 1 million buys and approach 1.5 million. De La Hoya and Mayweather set the single-fight pay-per-view record when they sold 2.5 million units for the May 5 bout that Mayweather won in the very ring he’ll take on Hatton Saturday night.
“All the revenue streams are tracking consistently at about 60 percent of what my fight with Mayweather did and that’s usually the way the pay-per-view comes in, too,” De La Hoya said.
The Mayweather-De La Hoya PPV drew a reported buyrate of 2.5 million customers. 60% of 2.5 million buys would be 1.5 million buys. The reported buyrate of 850,000 for Mayweather-Hatton would equal 34% of the business (or around one-third) that the 5/5/07 fight did in Las Vegas.
Given the level of hype and expectations by all parties involved going into the fight, the 850,000 PPV buyrate number is way below business expectations.
Topics: Boxing, Media, Zach Arnold | 20 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
I bet UFC would take that 850 K “disappointment” at the end of the month. I’ll be pleasantly shocked if they pull it off, but then, I thought they should have been promoting Liddell-Silva as far back as November and shooting 24/7-like specials w/ full history of that fight. That’s just me though.
The mainstream media would never give UFC over a billion dollars in free publicity for 6 months like they did for Hatton-Mayweather. If they did, I would imagine that Liddell-Silva could outdraw almost any boxing PPV.
It’s interesting to think about sports in general – especially insanely boring ones – and imagine what the interest in them would be if they didn’t get daily coverage across every media outlet in North America.
UFC is so far away from doing anything 24/7-esque. They won’t even state where Wanderlei trains.
Wand moving to America and training with an old rival to fight against a guy who beat his new trainer twice is a GREAT story. But the UFC thinks its better for business to just show Wand hitting pads in the Xyience gym and feature his winning UFC effort from 8 years ago.
^ Exactly what he said.
I read somewhere that Mayweather Hatton did 900 000 buys in the uk. Is that a total lie?
I know this is an old article, but after reading the comments, I thought it would be important to provide a a little bit of closure on this subject.
The official number for this fight, of UK PPV buys, ended up at 1.4 million. A new UK record, surpassing the 1.1/1.2 which Lennox Lewis Vs Mike Tyson generated in 2002. A massive number no matter which way you look at it, but astonishing considering that the fight was shown at around 5AM in the UK. Combined with the US number, it’s over 2 million. And then there’s the comparison ratio to what 1.4m in the UK would equate to in the US.
Well, there are a little more than 24 1/2 million households in the UK…only 15 million of them have internet access.
I suppose it’s possible that almost a million of them bought the PPV.
For what it’s worth, that kind of buyrate would be more than four times the buyrate in the United States.
850,000 is a ton of buys. Especially considering that neither guy has much of a following here. Hatton is a mega-star in the UK, but relatively unknown here. Floyd couldn’t sell out a high school gym, but he is a compelling character on TV.
I think 24/7 being on after the final episodes of the Sopranos and Oscar de la Hoya’s name created a perfect storm for DLH/Mayweather. the 2.5 million PPV buys they got were monumental and totally unexpected. Remember they were hoping to hit 1.2 million. 850,000 is more than 60% of that.
A lot of people who bought DLH/Mayweather probably felt ripped off by the lackluster fight. But I bet all 850,000 people that bought this one will buy the next big time boxing PPV. It’s too bad Pavlik/Miranda wasn’t on the DLH/Mayweather card because that would have brought people back to boxing in a big way.
The question now for boxing is what is the next Mega-fight they try to build?
You could do Cotto/DLH with the winner (Cotto) fighting Floyd next November or December.
HBO could do a 24/7 on Hopkins/Calzaghe. Too bad HBO doesn’t have a hit show to put it behind right now.
Zach has Uncle Festered the correct.
Dana will continue to shoot himself in the foot until he is #2 in the MMA world when he could have been #1 forever…….
According to the sun, mw-hatton did 900k buys in the uk, so that means 1,75million buys from us and uk. Not bad atall.
Certainly the UK numbers have to be taken into consideration here. What I want to know is how Floyd/DLH did in the UK, assuming that one was also on PPV.
I’d be wary of that Sun article. They’re not known for accuracy in reporting the facts.
In that story you link to they don’t even acknowledge a source. It’s pure speculation at this point.
Whilst I’d be wary about the Sun article it’s entirely possible it did 900,000 buys in the UK. It was an absolutely huge fight and the hype by the time I left for Las Vegas on the Wednesday afternoon was already huge in the English papers with at least one article a day. Sky (the television partner) were pushing it huge and showing 24/7 on one of their three sports channels about 5 times a day.
Despite the fight being on at 4.30am English time there were apparently around 10 people at my house alone watching it with my flatmates.
Floyd/DLH was just on normal pay TV (Sky) not PPV – to be honest no-one was interested in that fight over here.
850,000 buys isnt bad at all. It didnt get 1 mil buys but 850,000 is ok considering Hatton isnt a huge star in the US. I think those that bought it would of been happy with the fight and from what I have read HBO are supposed to be v happy with Hatton and want to sit down and discuss his next fight. Then again someone who can take thousands of fans across the atlantic is someone who HBO should be talking to. I read that Sky had an early estimate of 900,000 buys over here but aint sure if thats accurate. If it is then that is a great number for PPV in the uk. Overall I think Golden Boy are happy and HBO & Sky TV are happy with how things went.
Floyd/DLH wasnt on PPV over here. We dont usually have PPV in the UK unless it involves a british fighter. Luckily for us we get all the Big fights from America at no extra PPV cost.
I don’t really see any issue with the number at all – that’s a pretty big number for PBF given that Ricky was virtually unknown until this fight. 24/7 did an awesome job getting people hyped for this.
The fact that you can add around an equal number of buys from Hatton’s home country to the fight…the number’s starting to look pretty awesome actually.
So, what sort of tier of channel was this on for Sky?
Was it a channel that you get as part of your typical package, or was it one that you have to separately subscribe to on a monthly basis?
The channel on sky is called Sky Box Office. This channel is avaliable to anyone regardless of the package they are on. Its just there for PPV events such as boxing or WWE.
The basis for the 1.5 million numbers were ratings for the 24/7 series and the assumption that the number of buys per viewers for 24/7 would correlate perfectly for Mayweather/Hatton to Mayweather/De La Hoya. There are obvious flaws to this thinking and unquestionably there has to be some frowns over at HBO as a result. They will likely learn from that mistake however.
However, assuming the PPV even did half the buys reported by The Sun (450,000), that’s still 1.3 million worldwide, a very, very tidy sum. Hatton/Mayweather would have been predicted by most had you mentioned it in 2006 to do no more than 350,000 buys. At this point, Mayweather is quite possibly the biggest PPV draw in North America. Not that much to complain about….
damn the telegraph over here reports that sky put estimstes at 1.2 mil buys which could rise to 1.4 mil. Thats insane numbers for PPV in the UK. The final number will not be known until January, but Sky says the final buyrate will be well over 1 million