Earlier this month, Tyron Woodley took to social media to talk about the potential PPV buy returns on his boxing match against Jake Paul. While he didn’t give any hard and fast numbers, from the sound of things, it seemed he expected the final totals to be somewhere in the neighborhood of Logan Paul’s match with PPV king Floyd Mayweather.
“They still counting, that shit is still running up,” Woodley explained, speaking of the PPV buyrate for his event (transcript via Wrestling-Edge)
“We are right now, right underneath Floyd Mayweather and Logan Paul for the PPV, and still counting. If we go over, it’s going to be the 5th highest PPV in the history of PPV’s.”
If the ‘Chosen One’ is setting expectations sky high, however, that shouldn’t diminish reports that the reality may closer to a very strong 500,000. Wrestling Observer’s Dave Meltzer reports that Woodley vs. Paul is currently trending somewhere nearer that number, rather than anything like the 1,000,000 buys reported for Mayweather’s recent exhibition fight.
“Fighters are often told bullshit numbers by promoters after the fight,” Meltzer noted, by way of explaining Woodley’s statements. “Our best PPV sources were estimating it at around 480,000 to 500,000 buys and some others believe it was a little lower than that. It’s still good for a freak show fight but nothing like the numbers floating around. Showtime as a public company, if they give a number, it has to be close to real. The fact they haven’t yet would tell you it had to be well under 900,000.”
Following Jake Paul’s April event against Ben Askren, the YouTuber & former Disney star claimed the event sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5 million buys. But several industry notables have questioned the reality of those numbers. The Mike Tyson vs. Roy Jones Jr. exhibition bout in November of last year, where Jake Paul faced Nate Robinson in the co-main event, was estimated to have sold in the 1.5 million PPV buy range as well. Unless Showtime wants to actually go out and publish their own numbers, however, it’s doubtful we’ll ever know for sure just how successful Tyron Woodley’s boxing debut ended up being.
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