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Surprisingly, to some, the pay-per-view figures on the Floyd Mayweather-Victor Ortiz fight have not yet been released. Please understand that this is something that customarily comes within four or five business days after the fight, in the form of a press release, but that hasn’t come, and the fight was September 17.
What usually happens in this business is that when the figures are very good, the distributor (HBO PPV) will want the whole world to know about it, as soon as possible. When the numbers aren’t so hot, they are not so anxious to let that out.
This is what has led to speculation that the number of subscribers to this fight was much lower than anticipated.
What I have heard is that they might be as low as 800,000. This is something I definitely did not figure on, as Ortiz, and just as importantly, Canelo Alvarez, should have had some appeal to the very dependable Latin audience. I was expecting a million buyers. Others I had spoken to figured it might be as high as 1.3 million.
Richard Schaefer, the CEO of Golden Boy Promotions, which was one of the promoters of this show, was talking in terms of 1.7 million or even more, but of course, he had a special motivation for thinking in that direction. If he really believed it, he might be very surprised by now.
This story is written with the proviso that we may never know the real figures, unless we were an interested party or had the facilities to audit every cable system in the country, which we don’t. It simply isn’t public knowledge.
What usually happens in this business is that when the figures are very good, the distributor (HBO PPV) will want the whole world to know about it, as soon as possible. When the numbers aren’t so hot, they are not so anxious to let that out.
This is what has led to speculation that the number of subscribers to this fight was much lower than anticipated.
What I have heard is that they might be as low as 800,000. This is something I definitely did not figure on, as Ortiz, and just as importantly, Canelo Alvarez, should have had some appeal to the very dependable Latin audience. I was expecting a million buyers. Others I had spoken to figured it might be as high as 1.3 million.
Richard Schaefer, the CEO of Golden Boy Promotions, which was one of the promoters of this show, was talking in terms of 1.7 million or even more, but of course, he had a special motivation for thinking in that direction. If he really believed it, he might be very surprised by now.
This story is written with the proviso that we may never know the real figures, unless we were an interested party or had the facilities to audit every cable system in the country, which we don’t. It simply isn’t public knowledge.
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