This was disclosed by Showtime sports head Stephen Espinoza in a recent interview with Multichannel News programming editor R. Thomas Umstead.
Responding to a question from Umstead in a recent interview, Espinoza said he and his team were indeed surprised to find out that the huge volume came in during the night of the telecast when they learned that operators were experiencing difficulties processing the orders.
Umstead asked Espinoza: Were you surprised with the significant amount of day of buys for the fight despite heavy promotion to drive pre-buys?
“We were. One of the elements that made it hard to predict was that we did message so heavily on early buying by the viewer to avoid technical difficulties, so we weren’t sure how much of the early activity was in response to that messaging and how much was genuine overall excitement and enthusiasm for the fight. I guess our first real indication that there was a huge expansion of the audience was during the telecast itself when we starting getting some reports that some operators were experiencing technical difficulties processing the huge volume of orders that were coming in on Saturday evening.” Espinoza said.
“Ultimately we were able to buy some time by stalling the main event and that hopefully that allowed everything to get cleared up in time for a successful main event telecast,” he added.
The huge PPV buys is unprecedented in boxing history even as the final tally has yet to be validated for the networks and the promoters.
The surprising numbers can be traced to the long-running publicity the match received from both camps.
Mayweather has been credited for his marketing and promotional expertise even if he was pictured as the villain during the long-running fight talks.
Mayweather did not care about bad publicity that partisan fans were posting on social media as long as he gets them to talk about him and the fight.
Pacquiao on the other hand got positive publicity because of his “role model” image that media got the general public to talk about for the last five years.
Their combined efforts in promoting the fight resulted in getting public interest leading to a huge financial success for what is now known as the richest fight in boxing history.
