More proof John Skipper DKSAB

[Motorcity Cobra]

This article from boxing scene popped in my head today. Network executives were talking about PBC's time buy strategy. Every network executive thought it was an ambitious plan and it might work if Haymon could overcome some hurdles. John Skipper was the only one who thought it would fail.

RICHARD SANDOMIR - New York Times

For those of you who do and those of you who don’t associate with Al Haymon on the PBC, how do you think that strategy is going to play out in terms of building interest for boxing?

SEAN MCMANUS - CBS

I’ll start. I think he has a plan and he’s spent tens of millions of dollars on his plan, and I think Al looks at what’s happened with UFC and the explosive growth in that product and says to himself, “Why can’t I create that kind of excitement around the boxing world? Why can’t I take unknown boxers, put them on NBC and CBS and Spike and as many networks as I possibly can, and why can’t I create the kind of stars that boxing used to see in the 70s and 80s.

I think his play is to front all the money to invest in the television production and the marketing of these boxers and hopefully be able in a fairly short period of time there’ll be enough interest around these boxers that they will generate enough television ratings that the people now getting paid by Al Haymon to run these fights will actually start to pay themselves. So I think it’s a very specific plan whether it’s going to work, I don’t think anybody knows, including Al Haymon, but he has a real, concrete business plan on how to accomplish his goals and I admire him for that.

MARK LAZARUS - NBC

The roadblock he’s got to come over is building some names and getting them to fight regularly to continue to heighten their exposure and fan appeal. For us, being involved with it, as well as Sean is, I admire his courage and business planning. In success, it’s going to be good for the sport and good for sports in general

.

SEAN MCMANUS - CBS

The other obstacle I think he’s got to overcome is that the advertising support for boxing has been pretty weak throughout the years and I think he’s got to sell his case to the advertising community that the demographics are good and that the sale makes sense because the way it’s now being structured to a large extent on advertiser supported networks he’s counting on that as being the major part of his revenue and I think that’s one of the obstacles he has to overcome.

JOHN SKIPPER - ESPN

Last time I checked my XY-axis quadrant, it’s not in the right quadrant.

Reading the comments from that thread is hilarious.

https://www.boxingscene.com/forums/s...d.php?t=678144

When you look at DAZN'S model and you know the numbers don't add up and you know it's not sustainable. But I totally understand why y'all would think Skipper & an Eastern European guy knows more about boxing than a pioneer and one of the most successful men in the sport. I totally understand why y'all would think those two are smarter than Haymon. Trust me. I get it

['b']

I get it yo, but we still tha rockstarz yo!

[Motorcity Cobra]

Bwahahahahahahaha

Could be less if he burns through all the investors money. The problem is the cost for these shows is enormous. He is paying huge fight purses, huge production costs and then on top shoots millions to the networks for the time buys. And so far little to none commercial advertisers have joined in which is why instead of commercials they just run promos for PBS events. Means its all out of pocket for the investor's. they are making almost nothing in ticket sales with many empty seats and rumors of them giving away a mass amount of tickets for free. If they don't get advertisers or higher ratings I doubt they make it to year 2 because the money losses will be to great. Or they will have to scale down the shows meaning lower quality fighters.

Go to ticket master and you can see with about day away the Dirrell fight is in a small arena with only half the arena for boxing yet still only around half the seats are sold. My guess is again on fight night on TV you will see tons of empty seats or PBC will walk the streets and comp a ton of free tickets hours before the fight. How you expect to sell PBC to the networks when you have no sponsors and are forced to give away tickets for your fights?

You can't cover up a "shady fight" with a "clean fight" on every show; you can't pay all of your 200 fighters millions of dollars while promising them 4 fights a year as well as protecting the records of your "most prized possessions".......there is a reason why utopias don't exist.

Haymon doesn't have enough stars for this to be sustainable. Of his 200+ fighters, maybe only 5 are known amongst casuals.

His second problem is that its unorganized. He has different networks showing fights on different days and at different times. The average casual fan cant keep up with who's fighting who on what channel on what day and at what time. I'm a diehard fan and I cant keep up with it. Sometimes I wont even know there was a PBC fight until the day after when I read about it here.

His third problem is, he's paying out the azz for everything with little return on his investment. He can only manage to keep this up but for so long.

Haymon assumed that boxing fans were so desperate for boxing to be back on network tv that they would just tune in to any crap fight he threw out there. His ratings and lack of sponsorship and advertisers buying up tv slot time during his fight cards have proved otherwise. I certainly applaud him for trying but I don't see this working out well for him.

I question some of Haymon's decision making. The PBC could've really used the May/Pac fight to launch the brand more. Instead of having a horrible fight with Santa Cruz that was made at the last second he could've had some exciting fighters in exciting fights like Spence, Kytrov, and Thurman. Then afterwards they should've had the May/Pac replay on CBS and pair it with a PBC show, again with some of your more exciting fighters. Two major lost opportunities.

I think he's losing another major opportunity not having Porter/Broner in Ohio at a higher weight.

PBC so far reminds me of the XFL. They had tons of money and lots of smart savy investors all involved on both sides. They had a 2 year plan to start as well. But it was a very expensive product that couldn't sustain it's losses. They spent too much money on production and promotion and didn't focus enough on the quality of the product. Haymon is spending his investors money left and right but the one thing he didn't do is make sure PBC has high quality fights. That's how you generate buzz and get the fans. Right now we are seeing way too many shows on too many networks all on different days and times and most of the fights are blatant mismatches. Many shows with headline fights that really should be on the undercard of better fights. He is more concerned with quantity instead of quality.

He has a strong stable fighters and could of easily made all his top fighters face each other. There is no reason Thurman, Broner, Garcia, Khan are all under PBC yet not fighting each other. Instead they are all fighting separate fights against weaker competition. He probably should of also lowered the amount of cards and networks he's dealing with to start the first year so that when a PBC show does come on it's loaded with good fights. Now you have a PBC event every week or a couple a week and not enough time to properly promote each event so you are getting a lot of bad shows. That hurts the brand he is trying to establish. If you catch a bad show on SpikeTV that's under the brand name PBC and that's your first exposure to PBC you are not going to tune back in when a month later when a good PBC fight is on NBC.

Unlike PBC XFL actually debuted to monster ratings but the first game was terrible quality and the second week ratings dropped big time because the Casual fans did not tune back to see if the quality got better. And by week 3 the ratings plateaued. The ratings from then on would of been good enough to get a year 2 but the cost of each event was so insanely high that they were losing money and no TV sponsors jumped on board to help recoup some of the losses. They ended up losing more money then they expected in year 1 and folded at the end of the season. Right now PBC is just super expensive infomercial that is sucking a hole in his investors wallet.

The problem is simple imo. Promoters/networks not working with each other is going to kill this in the end. Haymon's plan would almost certainly work if we could actually get the fights that really matter. As always though, the problem is the politics of boxing.

The other thing is the headlining of some of these events. Dirrell vs. Degale is a great and important fight at 168, but it is'nt headline worthy.

To have compelling fights, you have to risk fighters. That is the antithesis of Al Haymon's boxing model. His whole agenda is to give his fighters maximum protection while also maximizing money making.
That worked for Floyd and maybe a few other guys, but generally that's going to be a losing strategy.

Casuals do not want to see beautiful displays of the sweet science. They want to see punches being thrown. That means you're going to have to throw some guys to the wolves and let them go to war.

Anyone can make it about a year tossing cash around like confetti. It's when you don't turn a profit and keep coming back to YOUR INVESTORS asking for more cash and they start to give you the cold shoulder that the schit hits the fan. So, he's got a few more months before ugly reports really start to surface.

[Eff Pandas]

I'm not smart enough to get his answer first off with the XY sh^t.

But more importantly he don't need to know about boxing. He needs to know about handling a sports business & business in general cuz its not like he's not delegating. And this is getting old to have to clarify this but DAZN is a sports business, not a boxing business.

And the accounting sheet NEVER adds up well in a new competitive sphere like they are in this early in the game. Amazon, Uber & a bunch of other new businesses going big are ALWAYS lighting money on fire til they aren't. Uber is still in debt & lighting money on fire last i heard. Thats just how this works. If they win or lose is gonna depend on them acquiring NFL, MLB, NBA & other bigger sports than boxing not if their accounting adds up in the black this early in the game.

[pillowfists98]

It means PBC weren't making any money. And they still aren't.

[Motorcity Cobra]

I'm not smart enough to get his answer first off with the XY sh^t.

But more importantly he don't need to know about boxing. He needs to know about handling a sports business & business in general cuz its not like he's not delegating. And this is getting old to have to clarify this but DAZN is a sports business, not a boxing business.

And the accounting sheet NEVER adds up well in a new competitive sphere like they are in this early in the game. Amazon, Uber & a bunch of other new businesses going big are ALWAYS lighting money on fire til they aren't. Uber is still in debt & lighting money on fire last i heard. Thats just how this works. If they win or lose is gonna depend on them acquiring NFL, MLB, NBA & other bigger sports than boxing not if their accounting adds up in the black this early in the game.

He knew all that **** while he was at ESPN yet he didn't see how PBC or boxing for that matter could become successful. Now he's out of a job at ESPN & ESPN has boxing. Matter of fact he's the only one of the 3 who was forced out of their a job. Maybe the coke was clouding his judgement.

Look at McManus answer. You see he foresaw exactly what would happen.

Skipper is just another one of those that fail up.

[champion4ever]

This article from boxing scene popped in my head today. Network executives were talking about PBC's time buy strategy. Every network executive thought it was an ambitious plan and it might work if Haymon could overcome some hurdles. John Skipper was the only one who thought it would fail.

RICHARD SANDOMIR - New York Times



SEAN MCMANUS - CBS



MARK LAZARUS - NBC

.

SEAN MCMANUS - CBS



JOHN SKIPPER - ESPN



Reading the comments from that thread is hilarious.

https://www.boxingscene.com/forums/s...d.php?t=678144

When you look at DAZN'S model and you know the numbers don't add up and you know it's not sustainable. But I totally understand why y'all would think Skipper & an Eastern European guy knows more about boxing than a pioneer and one of the most successful men in the sport. I totally understand why y'all would think those two are smarter than Haymon. Trust me. I get it

Skipper has been proven to be an idiot when it comes to the latest marketing research trends of boxing in the U.S. Had he done his research it would have shown him that boxing is no longer a mainstream sport anymore.

Hardly anyone watches it outside of boxing fans. He has invested and poured all of this money into a sport that hardly anyone knows about. Boxing is hard enough to find on television as it is.

So he is expecting to give the sport more exposure, broaden its fan base and build new stars; By streaming it on an online video app over the internet? All I can do is just ask why?

With the advent of the internet, boxing would remain nearly extinct and a niche' sport because of it. As it will only serve to further isolate the sport from the casual fan.

On the other hand, what Al Haymon intended to do was honourable. He attempted to broaden the sport by giving it more exposure to crossover and mainstream casual fans in giving it more free air time over network television.

Not only in the hopes of giving his fighters more notoriety but by making new boxing fans also.

[Eff Pandas]

He knew all that **** while he was at ESPN yet he didn't see how PBC or boxing for that matter could become successful. Now he's out of a job at ESPN & ESPN has boxing. Matter of fact he's the only one of the 3 who is out of a job. Maybe the coke was clouding his judgement.

Look at McManus answer. You see he foresaw exactly what would happen.

Skipper is just another one of those that fail up.

He's out of a job at ESPN cuz he got busted doing coke like a dumb ass not cuz he sucked at his job.

And he put ESPN where it is today & ESPN is in a pretty good spot these days.

But AGAIN my main point & the one all you DAZN haters keep ignoring is DAZN isn't about boxing. Its not trying to be about boxing. It doesn't wanna be about boxing. It about sports, its trying to be about sports, it wants to be about sports. DAZN isn't gonna "win" or "lose" on boxing. They are gonna catch the W or L on acquiring bigger sports then boxing or not acquiring those sports.

If he's short sighted on boxing sh^t its cuz he's not a boxing guy. He's a sports guy. And because boxing is a niche sport boxing doesn't operate like most sports do so is it that surprising if he's wrong about some boxing sh^t?

[Thuglife Nelo]

Wilder: “First off I want to Thank John Skipper for the $100million, easy work. Second, I want to thank Al Haymon because Floyd used to say it. Thank u for the support...”

[Motorcity Cobra]

He's out of a job at ESPN cuz he got busted doing coke like a dumb ass not cuz he sucked at his job.

And he put ESPN where it is today & ESPN is in a pretty good spot these days.

But AGAIN my main point & the one all you DAZN haters keep ignoring is DAZN isn't about boxing. Its not trying to be about boxing. It doesn't wanna be about boxing. It about sports, its trying to be about sports, it wants to be about sports. DAZN isn't gonna "win" or "lose" on boxing. They are gonna catch the W or L on acquiring bigger sports then boxing or not acquiring those sports.

If he's short sighted on boxing sh^t its cuz he's not a boxing guy. He's a sports guy. And because boxing is a niche sport boxing doesn't operate like most sports do so is it that surprising if he's wrong about some boxing sh^t?

Compare McManus answer to Skipper's. Which one knows what they're talking about and which one is letting the coke talk?