Has the internet hurt or helped boxing popularity?

You can make absurd amounts of money but, as someone already said, the internet had greatly fractured attention. Boxing doesn't register with the common man anywhere near as much as it used to in decades gone by.

Ever see the clip of that woman in Brixton, London, who doesn't even know who Floyd Mayweather is as he gets his hair trimmed?

 

The Internet helped it

What hurt it is PPV pay walls

 

Helped - particularly the YouTube channels. We get to know the boxers more through interviews, which in turn, raises their profiles and helps sell tickets/increases viewer numbers.

The only downside to the internet is the rise of influencer boxing, which almost takes away from the lower level tiers of boxing, which boxers work hard to get into.

 

Yes, BREAKING NEWS with that big yellow banner. Rubbish. BBC still does this with menial stories.

 

How so? Viewing figures and PPV purchases have risen, hence why PPV has continued. If it didn't work, PPV would have been expunged. Boxing fans seem to think it's just a bunch of dunderheads sat in an office making uninformed decisions. Do you know how much work goes into this? These are interorganisational productions produced by major corporate players with an endless number of stakeholders.

 

How so?

It's quite simple from a popularity perspective, you get less viewers behind pay walls
That's a fact

I'm in no way talking about how the money people looked to maximise the money coming in
Your right, the decisions work for them and I also don't care how much work goes in to these decisions

I understand the terrestrial model didn't provide enough money for all involved but can you hand on heart tell me boxing wouldn't be more popular if PPV wasn't a thing?


But don't for one minute believe boxing PPV's across the world didn't play a massive part in the sport becoming for long periods of time a niche one

 

Correct.

The endless greed resulting in the plethora of subscriptions and Box Office events has driven millions of customers elsewhere to watch live sport.

 

Media fragmented over the years
No single channel, even pay channels, can afford the rights to huge fights any more
At the same time, PPV inflated boxers' expectations.
The net result - more PPV and fewer viewers.

On the other hand, that fragmentation creates niche communities which get quite large. There have probably never been so many people with a passing interest in boxing, as opposed to being a TV spectacle within a limited choice of options. Getting 1-2m people to buy a PPV for fairly ordinary fighters in the grand scheme of things is remarkable.

Even in the heyday of ITV boxing Benn and Eubank split the modern equivalent of about £3.5m when that fight on PPV would easily clear them £10-15m each now. What do you think they'd choose?

 

Fair points. Seems to me that raw viewership total isn't the most representative outcome variable when gauging genuine interest though. It seems to me that there's more interest now than there ever has been. That perception may be off given that we didn't have the social networking sites where all the couch critics could voice their opinion back in the nineties or so. Anecdotal as it is, it does seem to me that there are more people who can hold a conversation about the latent boxing events than there ever has been. People seem to be taking more of an interest in it. Certainly if it wasn't behind a paywall so much then there would be more, but these PPV fights are up on YouTube the next day or a few days later and people can watch them anyway. It's not the same as it being on ITV with fifteen million tuning in but that might be due to people having nothing else to watch and the ten per cent who are driven to youtube or other methods of watching might have more of a keen interest. So with all that in mind I think the internet has driven interest, but a lot of variables to factor in.