Once again, Netflix is touting a boxing audience that would rank among the very highest in the business.
Netflix on Tuesday said that last Friday’s boxing card between Anthony Joshua and Jake Paul averaged a global audience of 33 million, sourcing both its own internal data and the measurement company VideoAmp. The streamer did not disclose a U.S.-only audience is it had for past fights.
The global audience trails that of the Terence Crawford-Canelo Alvarez fight in September, which Netflix said drew 36.6 million. And it pales in comparison to the global audience of 108 million that Netflix claimed for Paul’s fight against Mike Tyson last November.
As is usually the case for Netflix boxing cards, the viewership estimates are not directly comparable to the U.S.-only Nielsen estimates reported for other sports on other platforms. YouTube earlier this year reported a global audience of 19.7 million for its exclusive Chargers-Chiefs Week 1 NFL game from Brazil, with the U.S. accounting for nearly all (18.5M) of that total.
Major League Baseball reported an audience of 51 million across the United States, Canada and Japan for Game 7 of the Dodgers-Blue Jays World Series, with those three nations combining to average 34 million.
Perhaps it is possible that a boxing card averaged World Series-level audiences that far outpaced even a high-profile NFL game, but that certainly runs counter to the general perception of boxing’s modern-day popularity.
It is not necessarily the case that the Netflix estimate is inaccurate, but simply that it would seem to have little in common with the numbers reported by Nielsen — and since the industry has used Nielsen data almost exclusively for decades, it is impossible to contextualize the figures the streamer is claiming.
VideoAmp is perhaps the most serious of the Nielsen competitors, and this year was reported to be working both with the NFL and ESPN. NFL chief data and analytics officer Paul Ballew even referred to VideoAmp as “intriguing” in a call with reporters at the start of the NFL season. But Nielsen regularly sues potential competitors alleging patent infringement and has done so to VideoAmp on multiple occasions, even filing a new suit against the company in April shortly after a previous effort was dismissed. Thus VideoAmp and other potential competitors have been relatively limited in their ability to establish themselves.
So far, Netflix has only used Nielsen measurement for its Christmas Day NFL games. Last year’s Christmas games averaged a Nielsen-estimated 24 million viewers on the streamer, a figure that would look noticeably modest if compared to the audiences it has been claiming for boxing.
