Pleased though he was with the way the fights on his network played out in the first year of the Premier Boxing Champions series, Spike Network President Kevin Kay sometimes found himself wondering why the boxers who performed on his air then showed up on NBC, CBS or ESPN while he got someone new.
“We’d have somebody that we’d invest in to tell their story, where we did shoulder programming, and they’d fight on Spike but then they don’t come back,” said Kay, whose network had intriguing fighters Danny Jacobs, Anthony Dirrell and Shawn Porter each appear once and then move to other networks for their next bouts. “If we’re going to devote on-air programming, we want to make sure they come back and fight on Spike.”
It was one of the aspects of the PBC that merited watching in the first year of the groundbreaking series, which brought a caliber of fight that for two decades has been the province of premium cable back to broadly distributed networks in a big way.
Backed by more than $500 million from institutional investors, boxing manager Al Haymon made an audacious
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Adrien Broner walks to the ring for last June’s Premier Boxing Champions fight against Shawn Porter.
Photo by: Premier Boxing Champions |
play, building a stable of about 200 fighters and buying time to showcase them on NBC, CBS, Fox and ESPN.
It was a proof-of-concept strategy designed to put up ratings that the PBC could then turn into a rights fee similar to that of a league or sanctioning body in other sports.
While the move brought antitrust lawsuits from competitors Top Rank and Golden Boy Promotions, the PBC delivered the three biggest non-pay-per-view boxing audiences of the last 12 months, as well as seven of the top 10 and 10 of the top 15, even while spread across networks and time slots in a way that can make it a tough find for all but the most attentive fight fans.
“One thing I think that the sport overall suffers from is unpredictability, in that if you want to follow a particular fighter, it’s an effort,” said Stephen Espinoza, executive vice president and general manager of Showtime Sports, the premium TV network that airs PBC fights. “You know when your favorite NFL and NBA teams are playing. But if you have a couple of fighters you are following, you have to make an effort to know what’s going on with him.
“That’s exacerbated when you have fighters bouncing around several networks.”
Because the PBC’s shows are primarily time buys, the networks have little say over who fights where. All of them said going in that they hoped the PBC would allow them repeat business from fighters who delivered an audience for them. But that often didn’t happen, in part because fights were canceled but also because PBC matchmakers didn’t appear to make that consistency a priority.
“You can’t build a brand having a bunch of fighters make their debuts and then never seeing them again,” said Jon Miller, president of programming for NBC Sports. “That’s one of the things the PBC understands and we are very excited about their plan for this year.”
While the PBC declined requests to discuss its television strategy, Miller and Kay both said they raised concerns earlier this year and have been assured that they would get a more consistent menu of fighters and road map of fights.
The wild card in that discussion is Showtime, where all of Haymon’s better-known fighters appeared before the PBC launch. Since then, they’ve done turns on the more broadly distributed networks, with the PBC paying to put them there while Showtime paid the PBC for the fights it got.
In the coming months, Showtime will feature rising heavyweight champ Deontay Wilder and featherweight champ Leo Santa Cruz, while CBS, which owns Showtime, gets what may be the most anticipated fight yet for the PBC, with Keith Thurman facing Porter for a welterweight title.
“There was a good degree of experimentation last year, and we as good business partners were allowing the experimentation to take place,” Espinoza said. “But there’s not another network making the kind of investment in the sport that we are. And because we are making that commitment, we are entitled to have the best fights.
“It’s tough for a network to look at a promoter and say they should have the best fights when they’re not paying anything meaningful, or anything at all, to get those fights. So it’s a tough position to be in as a time buy. You don’t have a lot of the moral high ground that you have if you’re paying the license fees that we are.”
Even with a far larger cumulative audience than HBO, the PBC has not cut into the perception that the established network remains the home to most of the top fighters in the sport.
“What we’ve found is that the primacy of our franchises hasn’t been disrupted at all,” said Peter Nelson, executive vice president of HBO Sports, who pointed to the network’s dominance of ESPN’s pound-for-pound rankings; HBO has nine fighters and the PBC has none. “What we’ve seen in our viewership is a great engagement between our subscribers and our content. We haven’t seen anything other than an enhancement of their engagement with the sport.”
A strong digital run
Though it will be its performance on television that determines whether the Premier Boxing Champions emerges as a financially viable property, some of its bigger wins of year one came on its digital platform, which quickly became a popular destination for fight fans, attracting 6 million visitors to the PBC website.
Highlights from PBC fights generated more than 67 million views of 30-plus seconds on YouTube and Facebook, with the PBC’s 43 million YouTube views approaching the count of the more established HBO Boxing YouTube channel, which had 48.4 million views in the last 12 months.
To build a Facebook audience, the PBC went beyond self-reported boxing fans to find nascent fans who have responded strongly, targeting, for example, African-American and Hispanic males who follow the NFL, college football or basketball.
Over time, they found that among the casual fans they seek to nurture, the quality of a fight was more likely to drive shares than a bigger-name fighter. The most-shared fight of the year among casual fans was a Spike fight that featured two little-known light heavyweights, Andrzej Fonfara and Nathan Cleverly.
“Generally, we find that what they really want to see, especially when these guys are unknown, is fighters fighting,” said Alex Balfour, chief digital officer for PBC’s creator Haymon Boxing. “You get some cool numbers coming out of social. But if you start a video with a talking head or logo, people will switch off very quickly. So we made sure in our video, we have people fighting from the off.”
