Although 8-division world champion Manny Pacquiao proved, with his dominant unanimous decision victory over Brandon Rios, that he's still a top fighter, the same can't be said about his drawing power at the box office. According to Hall of Fame promoter Bob Arum, Pacquiao vs. Rios brought in somewhere in the neighborhood of 500,000 pay-per-view buys. ""There was a little delay because of Thanksgiving, but it will be somewhere in the area of 500,000 buys. We ran all our numbers on something a little less than 500,000, but figuring we'd do around 500,000, and that's what we're going to wind up doing. It means 490,000 or 510,000, something like that," Arum recently told Dan Rafael of ESPN.com.
According to Rafael, as well as other industry insiders, there are some sources who claim that the fight barely even did 400,000 buys. Naturally, Arum was quick to defend the number, stating that because the fight took place in Macau, China, the pay-per-view buys in America were expected to be effected. "It's very, very difficult when you're not doing the fight in the United States," Arum explained. "The [pay-per-view] industry told us when you do an event that far away you can expect to do maybe 30 percent of what you would ordinarily do on the fight. We did a lot better. We performed better than that, so I think it was a big success. We had a huge audience on television in China."
Keep in mind that regardless of the location, the card still aired with a normal start time [9:00PM ET], and it also received the type of promotion, including a HBO 24/7 series, that's become standard with all HBO pay-per-view events. Some may blame the fact that Pacquiao was fighting a relative unknown to casual boxing fans in Brandon Rios. Others may point to the fact that the event had a weak undercard to support the main attraction. No matter how you explain it, however, the fact remains that those numbers are well below the 1 million-plus pay-per-view buys that Top Rank has grown accustomed to. In fact, that may be the lowest pay-per-view buys that Pacquiao has had since he faced Juan Manuel Marquez for the second time back in 2008, prior to his run of success against the likes of Oscar De La Hoya, Ricky Hatton, Miguel Cotto, and Shane Mosley, to name a few.
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