Floyd Mayweather and Logan Paul Sold a Million Pay-Per-Views, Generated $50 Million-ish

Floyd Mayweather and Logan Paul's exhibition boxing match (which did not feature a knockout) was very, very successful, according to a Sportico report. If accurate, the high-gloss celebrity boxing match will be in exclusive combat sports company, becoming just the 24th event to ever sell a million pay-per-views.

Mayweather - Paul Pay-Per-View Buys

A million people bought this fight! At $49.99 a pop! Can you believe that? The UFC has only topped a million buys 18 times. There have been five boxing matches to ever sell more than a million PPVs. Four of them involved Floyd Mayweather. Conor McGregor has sold over a million PPVs eight times between his fight with Mayweather and seven UFC events. Mayweather has the top two events ever while McGregor has seven of the top 10.

Floyd Mayweather - Logan Paul Revenue

If you're a fan of math, you'll note that $49.99 times one million is $49,990,000 which can easily be rounded up to 50 million dollars. Fifty million and a one million buys. Those numbers are so round and perfect that they're almost hard to believe. It's just not as sexy as Georges St. Pierre and Nick Diaz selling 950,000 PPVs.

It makes you wonder about the real (exact) numbers for the Mayweather- Paul fight. There appears to be just one case where we got an actual number: when McGregor tweeted paperwork that showed UFC 246 sold 1,353,429 pay-per-views.

Weirder still, when the fight happened in January 2020 it was reported that the fight sold the equivalent of two million buys, but didn't because of the newer ESPN+ PPV model. Yet on a Disney earnings call in February 2020, Robert Iger said the PPV had sold "about a million" and added another half million ESPN+ subscribers. Who knows what the estimate would be if McGregor hadn't straight-up posted the actual answer.

Floyd Mayweather - Logan Paul Individual Payouts

So who knows how many pay per views Paul and Mayweather really sold. It's safe to say it's below a million because otherwise they'd be shouting that they sold more than a million. It's most likely over 950,000 because rounding up is much more fun than rounding down. Whatever the exact numbers, we know about how much each guy made. Via Sportico:

According to reports Maywather was looking at a base of $10 million plus half the PPV money while Paul got a much smaller, but still significant slice of the pie, with $250,000 and 10 percent of the PPV money. So that's $30 million from the PPV between them and then $20 million to make some other people rich. Not to mention the live gate. Seems like a good UFC PPV might have some extra wiggle room for stuff like better fighter pay and maybe some long term health care.