I remain unconvinced Affliction’s new joint promotion with Golden Boy Promotions will end in success. However, the bottom line is that Affliction had to make a major change. Financial reality hit after their first show, and they found themselves in a position where they could not afford to lose that much again, but had no way to avoid losing that much again. They deserve credit for making a major change this early. Most promotions have waited too long, lost too much, and fell by the wayside before they could make changes.
In fight promotion, it is a universal truth that the main event sells PPV buys. There’s a reason UFC 66 did over a million buys and UFC 73 did under 400,000. Similarly, Oscar de la Hoya vs. Floyd Mayweather did over 2 million buys without any fights on the undercard to speak of. If Affliction can promote joint shows with just one big MMA fight and one big boxing fight, they may be able to pull in enough buys on PPV to survive. Besides those two fights, the fights on the undercard don’t matter at all, and they need to avoid fights like Matt Lindland vs. Trevor Prangley, which would have cost about $350,000 for nothing in return.
If the January show has Fedor Emelianenko vs. Andrei Arlovski, as well as the kind of boxing fight that would usually draw about 150,000-200,000 buys on PPV, they could very well double the buys of their initial show without increasing their payroll, as long as they cut out the ridiculous undercard contracts from their last show. They don’t even have to market this as a mixed show, they just have to market the two big fights. I am no advertising executive, but I think separate campaigns hyping each big fight could be effective at bringing fans of both in for the show.
I do not have high hopes for this experiment, but they are at least giving themselves a chance. If they eliminate high cost contracts from their undercard, and just focus on one big fight from each sport in the promotion of the January show, they have a small chance. Which is better than no chance, which is what they had as of a few days ago.