According to Dan Rafael of espn.com, The November 5th ppv fight between Manny Pacquiao and Jessie Vargas generated around 300,00 Pay Per View buys.
This week, Bob Arum told ESPN that his decision to have Top Rank produce and distribute the event on its own was successful. The Pacquiao-Vargas fight sold “around 300,000, probably a little more” pay-per-view buys, he said.
“It did about the same as Pacquiao-[Timothy] Bradley,” Arum said of the third fight between the rivals that took place in April and was produced and distributed by HBO.
“So if it did about the same as that fight, why do I need HBO to be involved? Why do I have to pay them a percentage when we can do the same thing on our own?”
Arum said he did not have precise numbers yet for the Pacquiao-Vargas pay-per-view sales because “one thing we can’t do is get a handle on all the numbers as quickly as HBO can. They have that down pat, but we’ll learn. That said, the numbers are still coming in and we’re pleased. We had a good show, we put on some entertaining fights, and we made money, the fighters made money, so that’s good.”
Although Vargas was not a well-known opponent and nobody expected Pacquiao to generate the seven-figure pay-per-view sales he did during his heyday a few years ago, Arum said he thought one reason the fight would wind up doing about 300,000 sales is because consumers knew that without HBO’s involvement that there would be no delayed broadcast on the network a week later. Arum also said he was aware that because fans can easily find live streams on social media, it likely robbed the event of hundreds of thousands of buys.
“It’s always been a problem, but it’s gotten worse,” Arum said. “It’s stealing, and it’s not just a Pacquiao fight. It’s Canelo [Alvarez] fights. It’s UFC pay-per-views. We have our attorneys working on things.”
