A lot of people watched Conor McGregor Vs. Floyd Maweather Jr. the good, legal way. But there also were an astounding number of people who utilized illegal means to watch Money defeat The Notorious via technical knockout in Round 10.
Early numbers show that approximately 100 million viewers watched one of 7,000 partial or full live streams of Saturday’s superfight, VFT Solutions, which monitors viewership of both legal and pirated streamed content, recently reported to Forbes. That means each stream had an average of roughly 14,000 viewers.
And while many people visit websites that illegally stream actual video of a given event, much of today’s privacy problem seemingly pertains to people pointing their phones at their TVs and streaming content to social media.
Irdeto, a firm which monitors worldwide piracy, took a regional sample of 239 illegal streams (nearly 3 million viewers) of the fight, and found that 69 percent of the streams were on social media channels such as Facebook Live, Periscope, Twitch and YouTube Live, according to Forbes. When taking all the available data into account, Forbes provided an initial — and admittedly conservative — estimate of $250 million in revenue loss.
VFT told Forbes that the preliminary numbers of pirated streams represent records for a single live event. So why were so many people willing to do whatever it took to watch this fight?
“For certain fans, The Money Fight may have seemed in advance to be a competitively matched clash of boxing and MMA champions,” Paul Gift, a sports economist at Pepperdine and business and analytics writer for the MMA media outlet Bloody Elbow, told Forbes. “But for many others, it was more of a spectacle fight, something you might want to see but not necessarily pay for.
“Add in a higher-than-usual United States pay-per-view price of $99.99 for HD and there was certainly a strong incentive to find alternative viewing options.”
Official numbers for pay-per-view sales for Saturday’s fight haven’t been released. But even with the amount of money the fighters reportedly made, neither can be happy about how much they potentially lost out on.
Thumbnail photo via Mark J. Rebilas/USA TODAY Sports Images
