Jake Paul’s victory lap is well under way. The YouTuber went 3-0 in his pro boxing career by defeating his third 0-0 boxer this weekend. He won that bout, over retired former MMA champion Ben Askren, via TKO in the very first round.
The event, which was heavily criticized for its snail-like pacing and its bloated schedule, was put on by Triller. That platform claimed the last time they featured Paul, on the undercard of Mike Tyson vs. Roy Jones Jr., they sold over one million pay-per-views. If this is true that event ranks as one of the top selling combat sports shows in history.
However, it’s hard to verify the numbers that Triller release.
This time around Paul is releasing the figures for how much this latest Triller event sold. In an Instagram post boxing’s most punchable face said that his fight with Askren sold 1.5 million buys and generated $75 million in revenue.
To emphasize his point Paul included a picture of him celebrating on a bed of one-dollar bills. If this claim is true, Paul vs. Askren would be the tied with UFC 196: McGregor vs. Diaz and Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Miguel Cotto for 12th highest selling PPV of all time (per Business Insider).
Bloody Elbow’s John S. Nash, co-host of the Show Money podcast, is not so sure about these numbers, though.
Ok I’ve been asking around and other sources in the industry are really suspicious of the Triller numbers. From their own contacts they think it did much, much less. Maybe less than 1/2 what was originally reported. So I don’t know what number to believe
— John S. Nash (@heynottheface) April 19, 2021
After consulting with contacts within the combat sports industry Nash estimated that the real number of PPV buys could be half of what Paul is reporting. If so that would make the show well behind the 55th highest selling PPV ever, which was UFC 158: GSP vs. Nick Diaz with 950,000 buys.
“The two big reasons to be suspicious of yesterdays numbers are 1) they came out very quick, even though most of the sales were through digital sales it takes more than a few hours to collect exact sales figures; and 2) they didn’t come from Triller themselves who would be the only ones to know the real numbers, especially that soon after the event,” said Nash. “A third reason would probably be that none of their competitors, who are following the event’s sales closely, bought those numbers. Their own sources are telling them it isn’t selling so well that it would match numbers only Tyson and Mayweather have reached before in boxing.”
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