Mayweather-Pacquiao Fight Shatters Expectations, Makes $500 Million in Revenue

Floyd Mayweather’s win over Manny Pacquiao was a money-making record-breaker, taking in a whopping $400 million from pay-per-view purchases alone.

Bob Arum, Pacquiao’s promoter, told ESPN:

“I think it was something we knew we would beat the prior record, but we didn’t have any reasonable expectation that it would exceed it by as much as it did. We were confident it would go over 3 million (PPV buys), maybe do 3.5 million on the outside. But it just caught fire.”

Fire indeed. Prior to the fight on May 2, the estimated pay-per-view numbers for the fight were set at 3 million. That would have been a record. Instead, the fight shattered expectations and produced more pay-per-view purchases than any other fight in history.

According to a press release sent out today from Showtime and HBO, which partnered on the show, the fight generated a record 4.4 million in domestic pay-per-view purchases, producing more than $400 million in TV revenue alone.

The cost for viewing the show was also a record-breaker, with people shelling out $89.95 for standard-definition and $99.90 for high-definition streams.

All figures for the fight either shattered or beat other pay-per-view boxing events. It slaughtered the former record breaker, which was 2.48 million pay-per-view purchases for Mayweather’s defeat of Oscar De La Hoya in 2007, and easily topped the $150 million mark set by Mayweather’s defeat of Canelo Alvarez two years ago.

In addition, if you factor in live gate at the MGM Grand Garden Arena, that’s an additional $71 million from the sale of 16,219 tickets. In total, the event is expected to generate over $500 million in worldwide revenue when international television distribution and sponsorships are also factored in, as well as closed circuit TV at 5,000 bars and restaurants nationwide who paid up to $15,500 in licensing fees.

So how much will Mayweather and Pacquiao make? The deal called for Mayweather to earn 60% of the revenue and Pacquiao to earn 40%. The purse for the fight was estimated at $200 million. Of that total, $120 million would go to Mayweather and $80 million would go to Pacquiao. But now that the fight beat expectations, the boxers will end up splitting more.

Since the fight generated over $500 million in revenue, Mayweather and Pacquiao will probably be splitting at least $250 million.

In reality, the boxers will probably end up making even more than that since those estimates are derived only from domestic pay-per-view and live gate sales. They do not factor in other revenue streams that might generate an additional $140 million for Mayweather and Pacquiao to split.

Not bad for a fight that lasted under an hour.

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