Saturday night’s mega-fight between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor was one of the biggest and most talked about sporting events of the year, and in the world of combat sports it is expected to be one of, if not the, highest grossing fights in history.
The current record for pay-per-view buys for a fight belongs to Mayweather-Pacquiao from 2015, when 4.4 million people purchased the fight co-broadcast by HBO and Showtime. The Mayweather-McGregor bout could very well come close to or surpass those numbers, although it’s unknown how much the buy numbers will be affected by the PPV streaming issues that caused a delay to the main event start time.
Official purchase information won’t be out for some time — for reference, Mayweather-Pacquiao PPV buys came out 10 days after the fight — but there is plenty of speculation about how it will measure up.
While delays and purchase problems could have turned away viewers, there’s also the ever-present issue of illegal streaming for a PPV bout. Periscope and other live-streaming apps have made illegal streaming even more difficult to stop, and those streams could play a role in the success of the PPV event — or make a potential record-breaking number even more impressive.
According to Forbes, digital platform security company Irdeto estimates that nearly 3 million people watched more than 200 illegal streams.
According to Irdeto, a digital platform security company, 239 illegal streams of the fight were watched by approximately 2,930,598 people: 165 were apparently made available through social media channels such as Facebook, YouTube, Periscope and Twitch, and 67 were available through illegal streaming sites. Kodi, a popular option for pirates, had six available as an add-on through the illicit streaming platform.
That might not even cover every stream out there, but it offers a concrete number to the massive amount of people that viewed the fight for free, avoiding the $100 PPV price. Even so, the fight is still projected to bring in nearly $500 million from the PPV market along with nearly $100 million more from the gate from T-Mobile Arena. So, when the jaw-dropping numbers come out in the next week or so, remember to add close to 3 million additional viewers to that number.
