Jake Paul: Silva fight did 200-300K PPV buys, interview killed interest

Jake Paul isn’t happy with the PPV buys for his fight with Anderson Silva.

Jake Paul isn’t particularly happy with the early estimates for pay-per-view buys on last weekend’s fight with Anderson Silva, and also has admitted there simply hasn’t been much post-fight buzz compared to some of his past outings.

On his brother Logan’s “Impaulsive” podcast, Jake said the fight likely did “around 200,000 to 300,000” buys, which he called “kind of upsetting.” He also said he believes the controversy around an Anderson Silva interview, where Silva said he’d been knocked out in training camp, hurt the fight.

“The pre-buys were going crazy — up, up, up,” Paul said. “And on 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 added, “The general public sees that and, ‘Oh, it’s not happening,’ Tommy (Fury) pulled out, Hasim (Rahman Jr) pulled out. ‘Jake fucking Paul can’t get an event together. This is done.’ It killed ticket sales. We were still selling tickets; that day, everything went to zero.”

Paul also said he believes that the lack of post-fight buzz probably had something to do with the time of year the fight took place, and that he plans to fight in the summer from now on.

“Halloween, World Series, Sunday football — this is the worst time of the year to fight, but guess what, I had to fight,” he said. “All my fights from now on will be in the summer with no sports. There’s, like, this perfect gap in July (and) early August where there’s no sports. And by the way, all my other fights were during COVID. No one had anything to do and anything to watch. The NFL was cancelled, the NBA, nothing was on.”

The last part is, like, incorrect — Paul’s only fight that would have been significantly impacted by COVID came in Nov. 2020, when he fought Nate Robinson on the Tyson vs Jones exhibition Triller event, where Jake was not the headliner. His Apr. 2021 fight with Ben Askren and his Aug. and Dec. 2021 fights with Tyron Woodley were all happening at times when sports were back on.

It should also be noted that 200-300,000 buys for Paul vs Silva would still be quite good in the current boxing market, where Andy Ruiz Jr vs Luis Ortiz on Sept. 4 reportedly did 65,000 buys, and Wilder vs Helenius on Oct. 15 reportedly did 75,000 buys, as major boxing PPVs are hitting some incredible lows lately.