I am sick and tired of these big title fights being on Pay-Per-View. I have never seen a live heavyweight title fight and would like to see one without having to shell out 50 dollars. Is it really worth it for TV to have these fights on PPV instead of say, ESPN or something? If they really do make a significant profit off of PPV as opposed to cable, then why isn’t the Super Bowl on PPV? Or the World Series?
Basically, I think boxing could be a huge sport if it was brought more in the public eye. Having it on PPV makes it somewhat of a secondary event (as far as water cooler talk goes).
Boxing can be entertaining, but from a modern advertiser’s perspective it might not be the best place to put your ad dollars. It’s a pretty brutal, high risk sport, and I really don’t see it being
“huge” again like it was in the past. I don’t know what the PPV demographics for major title fights are, but as a WAG I doubt they’re going to be delivering a particularly desirable demographic for most advertisers vs other places you could spend your ad dollars.
Maybe I’m off base, but I get the sense that boxing is considered an “old” sport by a lot of people, and it’s main viewing demographics are older men, and lower middle class hispanic and black audiences. These target demographics certainly have disposable spending income that might be attractive to some advertisers, but I doubt there’s enough cash from that direction vs PPV to have advertisers commit the large sums necessary to carry a night of boxing.
Here’s one thing to consider. I once worked at a Days Inn. We almost never sold out, because we had a lot of competition and franly we weren’t as nice. We faced Budgetel (now Baymont), Hampton Inn, Red Roof Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Best Western, Ramada Limited and ever old Motel 6 ALWAYS beat us out.
BUT we had one thing they didn’t have PPV for boxing. EVERY single day there was a big PPV fight we sold out and beat the competion hands down. What’s more is the people checked in, watched the fight and then left. Didn’t even stay the night. It was all local folk.
Granted that was about 12 years ago before cable was widespread but you really get the idea of how popular Boxing and PPV must be.
I couldn’t tell you the economics of cable v. PPV, but PPV probably works for boxing because it’s a niche sport, with not a great deal of broad-based support but a significant minority of fans who will pay big, big money to get their fix of pugilism. The thinking presumably is, hey, if we put this on PPV for $50 a pop, X number of people will watch it and pay us the cash; if we put it on cable, we only get X+3000 (or whatever) people to watch, none of whom pay us anything and we have to try to convince advertisers that X+3000 people is enough for them to pay us $50X or more.
You see other sports with niche appeal like soccer (in the U.S., at least) also on PPV fairly often, especially foreign national teams with a lot of expatriates in the U.S. (although some teams, like Mexico, have so many fans in America that they can get their games on free TV).