According to Dan Rafael of espn.com. Manny Pacquiao’s twelve round beatdown of Antonio Margarito generated in excess of 1.15 million Pay Per Views that produced $64 million in domestic revenue.
“We’re thrilled with the PPV performance,” said HBO senior vice president Mark Taffet, who runs HBO PPV. “With the breadth of interest from sports, entertainment and news media following Manny and the fight, boxing has tremendous momentum as we finish 2010 and head into a very exciting 2011.”
“This is the third consecutive year that a Manny Pacquiao megafight has exceeded 1 million buys and he has generated 5.1 million buys over his last five fights — true measures of his PPV superstar status,” Taffet said.
“I think the fight with Margarito did very, very well and we are constantly trying to figure out how to better our performances,” Top Rank promoter Bob Arum said. “Considering where we were when we announced the fight, nobody would have believed we would have done this. They said Margarito was disgraced and people talked about boycotting it.
“That’s one of the achievements we can take credit for — taking a non-American and crossing him over,” Arum said. “Can we do more? Yeah. Nobody would have dreamed that you could take a fighter from the Philippines and make him into an iconic American star and we’ve been able to do that. Most of the credit goes to Pacquiao, but we’ve been able to do that and now we have to improve on what we’ve done.
“It’s a work in progress. It’s one thing to do big numbers fighting Oscar De La Hoya, who always did big numbers. It’s another doing them on his own, which he is now apparently able to do. One of the ways to put it into the stratosphere is to make the Mayweather fight, but that is out of my control.
“I hope that is the next fight.
Photo by Chris Farina / Top Rank
