Jake Paul has admitted that the expected buyrate for his PPV boxing match with Anderson Silva this past weekend is “upsetting,” as the numbers appear to have fallen short of expectations.
As a result, “The Problem Child” has promised to fight only in summer, when competition from other sports is scarce.
Paul made the comments on brother Logan’s podcast Impaulsive. He opened the conversation on the buyrate subject by suggesting that competition from Halloween and numerous sports had dragged the numbers down.
“It’s weird. It’s weird. Halloween, World Series, Sunday football. This is the worst time of the year to fight, but guess what? I had to fight,” Paul stated. “All my fights from now on will be in the summer. There’s no sports. There’s like this perfect gap in July slash early August where there’s no sports. And by the way, all of my other fights were during COVID. This is like— when no one had anything to do, anything to watch. The NFL was cancelled, NBA, nothing was on.”
“I had to fight this year. I just had to get it f*cking done, bro. I’m sick and tired of waiting around.” Paul’s brother noted that last year, the fighter had made $40 million, yet in 2022 prior to the Silva fight, he’d made zero. “Not only did I make zero, I lost like millions of dollars just running a goddamn organization with 15 employees,” Paul interjected.
“I don’t,” Paul replied when asked if he knew the official buyrate. “I think it’ll probably go around like 200 to 300,000, really which is kind of upsetting.” Aside from the Halloween and World Series excuses, Paul cited Silva’s talk of being knocked out in training as another reason the Pay-Per-View struggled.
“On the Pay-Per-View buys thing, the pre-buys were going crazy up up, and one Wednesday when the news came out about Anderson saying he got knocked out or whatever, and the fight was in jeopardy and all this press came out, the pre-buys tanked all the way down,” he said.
“The general public sees that and thinks like ‘oh it’s not happening.’ Tommy [Fury] pulled out, Hasim [Rahman Jr.] pulled out. ‘Oh, Jake f*cking Paul can’t get an event together. This is done.’ It killed ticket sales. We were still selling, then that day, everything went to zero.”
Paul defeated the 47-year old former UFC middleweight champ care of a unanimous decision, in what was his toughest test to date. Heading into the final round, many had score the fight even (though somehow, not the judges in Arizona), with a knockdown in the eighth and final round giving the edge to Paul.
Following the event, the Youtuber called out Nate Diaz — another former UFC star, and one who is significantly undersized compared to Anderson Silva. That said, the trash talk Diaz is likely to bring to the table might make the buyrate on that proposed spectacle a little less upsetting.
