Showtime continued with significant gains in viewership on its flagship series Showtime Championship Boxing on Saturday, Dec. 14, drawing 1.3 million viewers to an action-packed main event featuring the welterweight world championship, Adrien Broner vs. Marcos Maidana.
Broner vs. Maidana has generated tons of buzz, as much for the classless actions of Adrien Broner, as for Maidana’s triumph in an exciting bout.
The audience performance during the main event ranks as the third-highest audience on record for live boxing on SHOWTIME since the network began tracking individual bouts in 2009.
The average viewership across the entire event, a four-fight, four-hour telecast, brings the series’ 2013 average up 24 percent and a remarkable 64 percent over 2011.
Further, the average audience for the entire telecast ranks as the fourth-largest live boxing telecast on Showtime since 2004 (when the Nielsen began separately measuring premium television multiplex channels) with all four coming within the last 12 months ranking behind the events headlined by Miguel Cotto vs. Austin Trout (Dec. 1, 2012); Paul Malignaggi vs. Adrien Broner (June 22, 2013); and Bernard Hopkins vs. Karo Murat (Oct. 26, 2013).
“SHOWTIME Sports has achieved incredible growth in viewership of Showtime Championship Boxing in 2013, and we’ll take this momentum into 2014,” said Stephen Espinoza, Executive Vice President & General Manager, Showtime Sports.
“With marquee events featuring boxing’s No. 1 pound-for-pound fighter and global star Floyd Mayweather, the return of Canelo Alvarez, and a myriad of incredible matchups on the horizon in the welterweight, junior welterweight and super welterweight divisions—the very deepest, most talent-rich divisions in boxing–our subscribers can continue to expect Showtime Sports to deliver the biggest and most significant bouts in boxing.”
—
For as much as fans complained of Broner’s antics this past weekend, the fact that he draws such high ratings only further enhances his position as a “star” in the sport, even if it’s as a person that fans love to hate.
As has been said, a worse punishment for Broner isn’t to hate him, but to simply stop watching him, if you think his antics don’t belong in the sport of boxing. As long as his fights generate such interest, he’ll be in big fights, and he’ll be paid handsomely to do so.
