How poorly will the Crawford-Postol PPV do?

Putting this fight on PPV is a huge mistake by Top Rank. This fight is going to be great and a lot of people who would normally watch these two won't get to see it. This should be on HBO World Championship Boxing. The PPV will bomb.

 

The point of this fight isn't to be a profit-generator.

It's to subsidize the cost of putting the fight on.

If it generates a small loss (which it likely will, but that's just speculation until we see what the breakeven is), HBO is still coming out ahead financially by not having to fund it entirely themselves.

I don't think people realize the precarious state of boxing in this country. HBO literally couldn't fund this fight without putting it on PPV. That's not a problem they'd have had 15 years ago when the budget was $100 million.

 

IMHO, it's not PPV material. You may be right about helping their bottom line but in the end if you nickel and dime your viewers, you will lose those viewers.

 

Less than GGG, Crawford hasn't been built up/hyped as much. And Postol very few know of.

 

Fossil Bob and his antiquated PPV model. :nut

Nothing against the fighters but I hope this PPV bombs to the point that promoters, through humiliation and humility, are forced to rethink this archaic system.

#GetAnAppAlready

 

I agree with you- boxing fans put up with more BS than the more mainstream sports as it is, and there's a limit to what even the "diehards" will take. I don't like that it's come to this.

10 years ago, this wouldn't have been PPV and neither would GGG-Lemieux. I don't like the trend, but it can't reverse until annual fight budgets rebound.

 

Casual fans have never hear of either fighter. No use speculating, I think this does so badly they won't release numbers.

 

I think the bigger problem is promoters not banding together to leverage their stables into a TV deal that could provide a platform for the sport to grow from.

It shouldn't be this way, but the egos in charge make it so. There is a record amount of money being spent on both scripted entertainment content and live sport content, but less and less of it filters down to boxing.

Promoters are too busy fighting each other to realize that the longer they operate as lone wolves, the more the overall boxing pie shrinks for everyone. It's like a version of the Stag Hunt.

 

I dont believe it breaks 100k. Probably 50k

 

PPV like this shouldn't have more than a $40 tag to it!

 

HBO is throwing all their money behind Game of Thrones. That's why they have less money for boxing. War of the Bast*rds didn't come cheap.

I always thought UNIMas is for low level fighters with a purse of 10k, not 7 figures. I hope the PPV does well, but it won't. Neither Crawford nor Postol has much of a name outside of the hardcore boxing world.

 

HBO's annual content budget is a shade under $2 billion. They spend less than 2% of it on boxing now, looking closer to 1.5% based on estimates and rough numbers.

The best hope boxing fans have, oddly enough, is the skyrocketing cost of producing and airing scripted content. HBO is at war with Netflix now (among others), and Netflix is driving the cost of everything up with their insane level of spending ($5.7 billion last year was spent on content- a growing amount of which is spent on producing more and more original content thanks the skyrocketing rate of the cost to stream from the owners).

There's such a glut of original programming now that the bottleneck is production- there's simply not enough crew and facilities to handle the demand.

As those costs rise, there may be a chance HBO decides to bump up their boxing budget. Getting it to 3% of the annual budget would still approximately double what it was this year.

 

If it's 'affordable', I might buy it. I'm extremely excited for this match up. Even though I don't expect much action, it's nice to see two prime boxers going head to head. Undercard isn't too bad.

Sooo $49.95? :rofl

Good point.

 

Why the hell is this even PPV? It should be on the networks. See this is when you have to appreciate PBC. If these guys were in Al Haymon's "stable" this fight would be on NBC, primetime. I will not be paying for this PPV, and I would love to see it live, not on replay. Stop wasting all the budget on sh!t like GGG vs Dominic Wade and maybe there would be some left for the fights that actually matter. But, oh well...

/rant

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