Pacquiao-Rios gets just 500,000 PPV buys - report

After selling at least 700,000 pay-per-view buys in his last nine fights, Manny Pacquiao fizzled in terms of sales in his fight against Brandon Rios in Macau last November 24. Initial estimates are tabbed at 500,000 buys.

"The numbers are coming in like we expected," Arum said in an interview ESPN’s Dan Rafael. "There was a little delay because of Thanksgiving, but it will be somewhere in the area of 500,000 buys. We ran all our numbers on something a little less than 500,000 but figuring we'd do around 500,000, and that's what we're going to wind up doing. It means 490,000 or 510,000, something like that."

In a nine-fight stretch, Pacquiao’s worst sell was his unanimous decision victory over Joshua Clottey in 2010, which got 700,000 buys. Clottey refused to engage with the much smaller Pacquiao who tried his best to make it an exciting fight. As a result of his performance, Clottey fell from his formerly lofty perch in boxing. He has since fought only twice with few people watching.

Against Oscar dela Hoya in 2008, Pacquiao got 1.25 million buys, followed by 1.5 million against Ricky Hatton. Pacman got over a million for his fights against Miguel Cotto, Shane Mosley, Antonio Margarito, and two fights against Juan Manuel Marquez in that same span. His decision loss to Timothy Bradley only sold 900,000 units, but it’s still a huge success compared to his number with Rios.

"It's very, very difficult when you're not doing the fight in the United States," Arum told Rafael. "But the deal we structured with [the Venetian Macao, the host casino] was to make up for that.

"The [pay-per-view] industry told us when you do an event that far away you can expect to do maybe 30 percent of what you would ordinarily do on the fight. We did a lot better. We performed better than that, so I think it was a big success. We had a huge audience on television in China."

Arum added that an opponent for Pacquiao’s April 12 fight would be announced in a month. - AMD, GMA News