Golden Boy: More than 1.2 million watched Canelo vs Jacobs worldwide

Golden Boy says that “more than 1.2 million people worldwide” watched the Canelo Alvarez vs Daniel Jacobs fight last Saturday night “live on DAZN.”

This statement leaves a lot of open questions, but people like discussing these numbers so here you go.

First of all, far more than 1.2 million people watched the fight worldwide, but they’re just counting DAZN numbers, it would appear, not, like, the ratings on Canal Space in Latin America or anything. But that doesn’t mean 1.2 million Americans watched it on DAZN, as DAZN is available in several other countries.

So what do we really know? I mean, it was a big fight with a lot of interest online, I can tell you that much. The numbers we did for the fight coverage rivaled the Canelo-GGG fights, which were HBO pay-per-view events, but then so did the numbers we had for Crawford-Khan, actually. Online traffic for fights can work in a lot of different ways; a fight like Canelo-GGG does well for us and on pay-per-view because it’s a good fight, and sometimes a fight like Crawford-Khan does really well for us because people want to know what happened, but that doesn’t mean they’ll buy the pay-per-view.

People have a lot of questions about DAZN’s subscriber numbers in the US, and they should, because it has to be a viable enough number if boxing is going to thrive on that platform. The effort is there, and so is the money with which to make that effort, but ultimately it’s going to come down to them getting people to sign up.

We’re still very early in the game with DAZN, of course, as they just launched in the States last September, and Canelo-Jacobs was their first true major event for an American audience, a fight that would have done real numbers on traditional pay-per-view.