Jake Paul vs Anderson Silva sales weren’t as big as they expected.
Jake Paul may have gotten more respect after notching the biggest win of his career by beating Anderson Silva, but the event did not sell as much as he would have liked.
“It’s weird. Halloween, world series, Sunday football — this is the worst time of the year to fight, but guess what, I had to fight,” Paul said on his brother Logan Paul’s podcast.
“All my fights from now on will be in the summer. There’s no sports. There’s like this perfect gap in July slash early August where there’s no sports. And by the way, all of my other fights were during COVID, when no one had anything to do, anything to watch.”
Paul gave a low buy rate estimate for his bout against the UFC legend. He says the timing wasn’t good but he had to fight after losing money marketing and promoting two events already that were both cancelled.
“I had to fight this year. I had to get it f—ng done, bro. I’m sick and tired of waiting around,” he said. “Not only did I make zero (this year before the fight), I lost like millions of dollars just running a goddamn organization with 15 employees.
“I don’t (know the official PPV buyrate yet). I think it’ll probably go around like 200 to 300,000, really which is kind of upsetting,” he said.
Paul believes the fallout from Silva’s comments about getting “knocked out” in training hurt both the PPV and ticket sales.
“The pre-buys were going crazy up up, and one Wednesday when the news came out about Anderson saying he got knocked out or whatever, and the fight was in jeopardy and all this press came out, the pre-buys tanked all the way down,” he said.
“The general public sees that and thinks like ‘oh it’s not happening.’ Tommy pulled out, Hasim pulled out. ‘Oh, Jake f—ng Paul can’t get an event together. This is done.’ It killed ticket sales. We were still selling, then that day, everything went to zero.”
Apart from the other sports Paul mentioned, his fight happened on the same day as a UFC event, and two other important boxing events that featured the biggest female boxing star in Katie Taylor, and the return of Vasiliy Lomachenko.
If his estimate is accurate, 200-300K PPV buys would actually be pretty respectable, considering the schedule and how heavyweight star Deontay Wilder’s bout reportedly drew a measly 75,000 buys just two weeks prior. It does show though that Paul still isn’t a surefire “must watch” and draw just yet.
The Paul-Silva bout reached a lot of mainstream and casual fight fans and clearly generated a lot of buzz online — far more than most recent UFC cards — and it’ll probably the same if he does book a similar high profile opponent next. But social media and online traffic doesn’t always translate to PPV buys, and it’ll be on Paul and his team’s to find a way to convince those people to actually shell out $60 for his next fights.
Silva is a UFC legend, but perhaps this is why Paul is looking to book a bigger attraction in Nate Diaz next, who has been a proven draw both as the A-side and the B-side.