Comments Thread For: Valdez-Berchelt ESPN Bout Peaked At 960,000 Viewers; Averaged 895,000

[VashDBasher]

These numbers are pretty good considering that is was not a fight for the casuals. Valdez put on a masterful performance and I’m sure he’ll attract more viewers for his next bout that his name is more known.

[TJ highway]

Max Kellerman said many years ago in a radio show that HBO (before the HBO quit boxing) conducted a study on boxing viewership. Max stated that HBO discovered there were on average 700 thousand rabid boxing fans that will watch regardless of the fighters. Any thing over 700 thousand was the targeted audience,


When a 20-year-old Tyson became the youngest heavyweight champion in history by knocking out Trevor Berbick in 1986, he did it on HBO. His upset loss to Buster Douglas in Tokyo was an HBO fight. So was the June 1990 fight between Meldrick Taylor and Julio César Chávez that was halted controversially with only seconds remaining. Other memorable fights — Hagler-Leonard, Hagler-Thomas Hearns and Leonard-Hearns — were HBO-produced closed-circuit telecasts that were later replayed to huge audiences on HBO.

Such bouts sometimes attracted as much as one-third of HBO’s domestic subscriber base, which was roughly 15 million people at the time. Now that base is roughly 40 million, but according to Nielsen, HBO boxing telecasts in 2018 averaged about 820,000 viewers, or about 2 percent of the total audience.

That decline in viewership, apparent for the past several years, was the final straw for Nelson. Boxing was no longer a profitable investment for HBO.

[James Hunt]

Compared to SHO, this is brilliant.

[champion4ever]

Those are very good numbers. Congratulations to ESPN on televising a very entertaining card. It's safe to say that boxing is here to stay.

[Thuglife Nelo]

The LDBC channels are saying Broner did more

[ironpad]

The LDBC channels are saying Broner did more

haha of course they are, I think it got like 200k viewers or something weak like that.