Netflix is claiming a nine-figure global audience for its Nov. 15 boxing spectacle between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson.
The streamer says 108 million people worldwide watched social media star-turned-boxer Paul beat the 58-year-old former heavyweight champion. Those figures are based on U.S. viewing tallies from analytics company TVision and Netflix’s first-party data for the rest of the world. The 108 million figure comes two days after Netflix said 60 million of its member households worldwide (about one of every five subscription holders) watched the bout, with a peak of 65 million concurrent streams.
Prior to the Paul-Tyson bout, a title fight between women’s super lightweight champion Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano (Taylor won a controversial unanimous decision) brought in 74 million viewers worldwide, with 47 million watching in the United States, according to average minute audience (the closest streaming analogue to linear TV measureument) from TVision. That would make the Taylor-Serrano fight the most watched professional women’s sporting event ever in the U.S.
In Netflix’s standard metric of views (total viewing divided by run time), the full event racked up 46.6 million from Friday through Sunday, easily the biggest total to date for a Netflix live presentation over that length of time.
All those viewers came despite a glitchy live telecast that led scores of viewers to complain about buffering and audio problems during the bouts.
The Paul-Tyson bout was the most streamed sporting event ever, but it falls behind some other huge global sports telecasts (though worldwide viewing figures are notoriously fuzzy). The NFL said February’s Super Bowl LVIII had a global audience of about 186 million people (123.7 million domestically), and soccer’s governing body FIFA claimed more than 1 billion saw the 2022 men’s World Cup final between Argentina and France. A 2017 heavyweight fight between Wladimir Klitschko and Anthony Joshua also claimed a nine-figure audience worldwide, with estimates as high as 500 million viewers.
Source: Hollywoodreporter
