According to Dan Rafael of espn.com, the November 23rd bout between Manny Pacquiao – and Brandon Rios did about 500,000 buys on Pay Per View.
“The numbers are coming in like we expected,” sais Top Rank’s Bob Arum Arum. “There was a little delay because of Thanksgiving, but it will be somewhere in the area of 500,000 buys. We ran all our numbers on something a little less than 500,000 but figuring we’d do around 500,000, and that’s what we’re going to wind up doing. It means 490,000 or 510,000, something like that.”
“It’s very, very difficult when you’re not doing the fight in the United States,” Arum said. “But the deal we structured with (the Venetian Macao, the host casino) was to make up for that.
“The [pay-per-view] industry told us when you do an event that far away you can expect to do maybe 30 percent of what you would ordinarily do on the fight. We did a lot better. We performed better than that, so I think it was a big success. We had a huge audience on television in China.”
“We’ll have Manny fighting back in the United States with Zou Shiming on the undercard and do a pay-per-view in China, where it will be on Sunday morning,” Arum said.
As for Pacquiao’s opponent in April, Arum said there are three names under consideration: a fifth fight with Marquez, a rematch with welterweight titlist Timothy Bradley (who claimed a highly controversial split decision against Pacquiao in June 2012), and newly crowned junior welterweight titlist Ruslan Provodnikov of Russia.
“It’ll be one of those guys,” Arum said. “We’re gonna get it done sometime this month I hope. I want to start promoting it. What we’re hoping to do is get Manny over here in January to do press conferences for the fight and also to do rallies in places like Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Washington, D.C., for relief for the victims of the typhoon in the Philippines.”
