Comments Thread For: Pacquiao-Horn - Highest Rated Boxing Telecast on Cable Since '06

[Strategic1]

Man..if Pacquiao actually finished Horn....the hype train would've started moving... now the talk is.. he's aging but still won the fight. Oh well.

[Shadoww702]

Damn Horn was only guaranteed $500K???

[dibzvincent143]

Man..if Pacquiao actually finished Horn....the hype train would've started moving... now the talk is.. he's aging but still won the fight. Oh well.

Id still stick to the "hes aging and got lucky lol

[sicko]

Great For Boxing IN GENERAL! You could get other Networks to INVEST into boxing like ESPN is doing which would be great for the fighters most importantly!

Unfortunately such a big Audience seen a great fight ruined by Controversial Decision and left unhappy but still a Big Audience Regardless! But look at the streaming numbers compared to the actually TV Numbers. That is something boxing really need to focus on because boxing is way behind when it comes to Streaming Content and all that stuff!

[gee73]

Still less viewers than Mayweather-Pacquiao had PPV buys.

[IMDAZED]

Still less viewers than Mayweather-Pacquiao had PPV buys.

Blame Jeff Horn. If it was Thurman, Garcia, Spence or even Crawford, I bet those numbers are doubled. I thought this fight would do Thurman-Garcia #'s so I'm a bit surprised. But given Horn's lack of namepower, I bet the matchups will be better going forward.

[diceflawless]

Thats it?

Pacquiao has been able to sell between 800k to 1 million PPVs for half of his career. Now only 200k of those ppl are willing to watch for free!? What are yall celebrating???

[SCEN3RY]

No surprise. ESPN is literally on every bar, restuarant, & business TV in the USA. ESPN understandably is a far better outlet for sports over cbs/nbc/bounce etc.

it's true, with little promotion and all, I'm sure a lot of people just had the television tuned to the channel not knowing anything about the upcoming event. Although I'm sure a lot also turned off their televisions because the previous fights were eh and the main event didn't come on until after 12...they really need to cut down on the undercards.

It's interesting bc ESPN apparently wasn't Top Rank's first choice for this venture...it does however seem like the most natural place to add boxing to.

[stiff_back]

I'm not sure these numbers are that great... it averaged 2.8 million and probably peaked no higher than 3.8 million (based on PBC cards that had similar averages).

Judging by the fact that this was a debut for the TR on ESPN series and a "Pac fight" the numbers aren't likely to get much higher than this on ESPN (again based on what we've seen with PBC). In fact with the Loma and Crawford fights I'm guessing we will get a much lower rating.

These were good numbers for ESPN, but if the series pretty much peaks like this, I'm not sure it does a huge amount for the sport's popularity in general.

A good comparison with this fight is the Klitchko-Jennings fight on HBO in primetime in 2015. It averaged 1.3 million across the broadcast with HBO going out to two and a half times fewer homes than ESPN does. So if we scale up HBO's audience to ESPN's size, the fight would have averaged 3.25 million, which is a lot higher than the Pac fight. My guess is this is because ESPN has a lower percentage of it's subscribers that are current boxing fans than HBO does. This makes sense, of course, but the challenge that TR has is to win over new fans to the sport, the same way that PBC does.

Edit: Actually scratch this, because the main event seemed to peak higher than I thought, so in terms of peak ratings this was really good

[paulf]

Saw randoms posting about it on Facebook. Mayweather-Pac aside, I haven't seen everyday people talking about Pacquiao since Pac-Mania hit its peak in 2009.

Non-premium/PPV is a good thing. Doing it on ESPN is the perfect match IMO.