Comments Thread For: PBC Outpaces Competition on Slow Easter Weekend

[mrpain81]

Solid for a show with a budget of maybe a half million bucks. But the numbers they are drawing will never result in advertising rates high enough to pay even 10% of what their overall production costs are.

How much did Haymon lose for the Stevenson card?

So you're giving advise to Haymon to do exactly what? Give the money back to his investors? Keep boxing on HBO/SHO? Wait for the networks to give him a deal out of the kindness of his heart?

What should any boxing promoter/adviser/manager do to stop the boxing viewership from dwindling year after year?

How do we turn this ship around since obviously this is going to be a money losing effort according to the boxing scene execs who are now worried about Haymons money.

[.:: JSFD26 ::.]

Don't be a moran.

Ratings for live sporting events usually trend upwards, the final numbers will probably be out tomorrow including the peak.

The current ratings are just overnights.

You're going in so hard to defend this that I hope for your sake the numbers tweeted were a lie.

[RyanjLarose]

So that's what it's all about? It's not about Boxing fans having an alternative to having to buy premium cable?

For the first time in about 30 years a boxing fan can watch mid to high level boxing for free. You can actually cut your $100 cable and watch some decent fights, sure you're going to miss out on fights but you will still get to see plenty.

Also I'm pretty sure these fights were on PPV in Canada and Australia, that should subsidize some of the money Haymon had to pay.

nah man was free here

[Da Machine]

Why do people keep bringing up Haymon making money now and how much he is spending and he has no ads. It's as if you know nothing.

[mrpain81]

You're going in so hard to defend this that I hope for your sake the numbers tweeted were a lie.

I never said they were a lie, it was the overnight ratings.

Don't be blissfully ignorant to things you know very little about.

[Mitchell Kane]

Angulo/Arreola/Berto caused the ratings to dip? Those are 3 have constantly been in exciting fights.

And they've also lost just about every meaningful fight of their careers.

It's one thing to have a guy like Arreola as a 'B' side in a fight, it's another to give him showcases and set ups with the likes of Chazz Witherspoon, Travis Walker, Brian Minto, and a faded Jameel McCline who'd lost 3 of his last 4 fights.

But what HBO did, giving a lot of house fighters - many of them associated with Haymon, GBP, or both - a lot of showcase fights, some of them with some VERY weak opposition.

I mean, come on, Brian f'n Minto.

That some of Arreola's showcases ended up being exciting, like the Walker and Minto fights, only speaks to how poor Arreola was.

As for Andre Berto, the guy was pretty much a permanent fixture on HBO for before he had a meangingful fight, with a steady diet of the likes of Miguel Figueroa, David Estrada, Michael Trabant, Miguel Angel Rodriguez, and then much like with Arreola-McCline, he fought the ghost of Steve Forbes, who like McCline, had 3 of his last 4 fights. (But hey, he was in The Contender finale! ...which he lost.)

And when Berto did step up, he barely escaped with a decision against Luis Collazo, and instead of a rematch, he returns to HBO with a blown up Juan Urango.

There's a number of reasons why HBO's ratings went down in the 2000's, but too many showcases and poor match-making were certainly part of it.

[mrpain81]

There's a number of reasons why HBO's ratings went down in the 2000's, but too many showcases and poor match-making were certainly part of it.

It's a weak argument to try to pin this on GBP or Haymon, plenty of other promoters had weak shows in that time.

4/12/2008 Miguel Cotto vs. Alfonso Gomez - 1.113 Million Total Viewers

6/07/2008 Kelly Pavlik vs. Gary Lockett - 1.1 million live viewers.

4/25/2009 - HBO - Juan Manuel Lopez vs. Gerry Penalosa - averaged 990,000 live viewers

5/9/2009 - HBO - Chad Dawson vs. Antonio Tarver II - averaged 960,000 live viewers

11/7/2009 - HBO - Chad Dawson vs. Glenn Johnson - 774,000


The ratings had been dipping for years before Golden Boy got the output deal.

12/19/1997 Kevin Kelly vs. Naseem Hamed - 3.7 million live viewers

1/31/1998 Bernard Hopkins vs. Simon Brown - 2.345 Million Total Viewers

3/24/2001 Oscar De la Hoya vs. Arturo Gatti - 4.05 Million Total Viewers

1/26/2002 Vernon Forrest vs. Shane Mosley I - 4.174 Million Total Viewers

6/21/2003 Lennox Lewis vs. Vitali Klitschko - 7.036 Million Total Viewers

11/15/2003 Manny Pacquiao vs. Marco Antonio Barrera - 3.3 million Live

5/8/2004 Manny Pacquiao vs. Juan Manuel Marquez - 2.2 million live

The problem was a combination of slashing the budget so almost every meaningful fight went to PPV. Also HBO lost a lot of it's stars to retirement and didn't make any new ones to replace them on HBO. Every worthwhile fight was being put on PPV.

The lowest ever HBO Championship Boxing telecast up until 2007 was :

11/3/2007 Joe Calzaghe vs. Mikkel Kessler - 1.591 Million Total Viewers

You skip ahead 7-8 years and that fight would be the most watched boxing telecast in 2013-2014. Think about that for a minute.


We can argue for weeks about what happened to the quality of HBO boxing and why the ratings went into a tail spin. Right now people need to realize that if the PBC didn't happen this sport would keep falling deeper and deeper into the obscurity abyss. Constructive criticism is fine but a lot of people are just nitpicking every little thing because deep down they hate haymon more then they love the sport of boxing.

[croz]

85,000,000 homes have FS1

110,000,000 homes have CBS

FS1 has 77% of the households that CBS reaches.

1,270,000 vs. 389,000.

Only did 30% of the ratings.

Fastest growing sport did great and Boxing did horrible as usual with the TV execs that post here.

It didn't do horrible. It won the timeslot.

[Barcham]

It didn't do horrible. It won the timeslot.

Winning a Friday night or Saturday night timeslot is not exactly the holy grail of broadcasting. Boxing has made it when you can show it on a Thursday night at 8 PM and it wins the night against a first run episode of Big **** Theory. When boxing can do that, I will say it is a success.

[croz]

Winning a Friday night or Saturday night timeslot is not exactly the holy grail of broadcasting. Boxing has made it when you can show it on a Thursday night at 8 PM and it wins the night against a first run episode of Big **** Theory. When boxing can do that, I will say it is a success.

The ratings reflect the slot it was in. This wasn't a major fight. Just two obscure guys fighting on an obscure card in an obscure timeslot. Hell it did almost similiar numbers to a basketball final. The D level cards will pull D level numbers. Fights like Thurman vs Ghost, Peterson vs Garcia would be C level fights. Canelo, Cotto etc B level. Manny/Mayweather A level.

That's also a bogus barometer. These aren't major names in boxing. Sure maybe get Cotto/Canelo/JMM/Hopkins/GGG/Bradley on and we'll see numbers like that but expecting guys like Adonis to pull viewers in the tens of millions on a friday is nonsense.

I believe back in the day Hopkins would pull around 5 million viewers and GB would pull 6 million on free tv.