Last Friday as I was dropping my car off for some brake work, I overheard some of the mechanics talking about whether anyone planned to watch the Mike Tyson–Jake Paul fight on Netflix that evening. “Yeah, might as well,” someone said. “It doesn’t cost anything.”
Obviously, Netflix isn’t free (especially after its crackdown on password sharing), but it was clear what this guy was saying: Unlike so many big bouts in recent years, boxing fans who wanted to watch Paul and Tyson dance around aimlessly for a half-hour didn’t need to shell out upwards of $100 to a pay-per-view distributor. So in the roughly two-thirds of U.S. homes that have a Netflix subscription, Paul vs. Tyson was essentially free for anyone who wanted to watch — and not surprisingly, a whole lot of folks did exactly that. But does that make it a big win for Netflix?
As you’ve likely read by now, Netflix says that at its peak, last Friday’s main event was streaming on 65 million devices around the world, with about 58 percent of the audience — 38 million accounts — located in the United States. That translated to around 108 million global viewers during an average minute of the fight, according to the streamer, which cited a Nielsen wannabe called TVision as its source. Oddly, Netflix hasn’t offered an estimate of how many viewers the Paul-Tyson fight drew just in the United States, but given it did say that about 58 percent of the total streams for the event originated here, it’s probably not a stretch to guess that roughly 58 percent of the 108 million worldwide viewers were located in the States, too. That would put the U.S audience just shy of 63 million viewers, making it one of 2024’s most-watched TV events. (The one caveat in all these superlatives is that, even though Netflix is a client of Nielsen and will use the ratings giant to release data for its upcoming live NFL broadcasts, the streamer opted not to use Nielsen data for the fight, making comparisons to other big events more difficult.)
It seems pretty clear that audience interest in the event was absolutely huge. You didn’t even have to wait for a release from Netflix to know that a whole bunch of people tuned in: On the night of the fight, social media exploded with complaints from subscribers fuming about not being able to access the event or with buffering issues once they got in. It was the Love Is Blind live-reunion fiasco, but on steroids: a big tech “L” for a streamer that in the past would brag about how quickly its app starts up and how rarely users suffer from buffering issues.
I’m not at all suggesting that this is in any way a good thing for Netflix; it’s just the opposite, as I’ll get into a bit later. But since Netflix is used to managing tens of millions of concurrent streams every single day, the fact that it couldn’t quite do so last Friday sure seems to back up the streamer’s claim that some 65 million homes were streaming a single event all at once, including 38 million U.S. households.
While you’d think that at this point Netflix had nothing left to prove — the streamer already completely revolutionized the global TV landscape — I do think the audience for last week’s event will go down as yet another watershed moment for the company. What Netflix demonstrated Friday was an ability to do something the Big Three broadcast networks used to do weekly for decades: turn something into an event just by virtue of it airing on their platform. Back in the 1980s and ’90s, tens of millions of Americans would watch programs that were absolute crap just because they had the right time slot on a network.
And when networks served up special events, we also showed up in bigger numbers than we might have otherwise, including when it came to boxing. One Friday night in late November 1979, for instance, about 55 million Americans turned on ABC to watch Sugar Ray Leonard take on Wilfred Benítez. Earlier in the decade, more iconic bouts featuring Muhammad Ali generated even bigger audiences, capturing over half the available viewing audience at the time.
Back then, those sorts of numbers were big — but also not unusual. Not so today, when even the biggest shows on network TV rarely crack the 10 million viewer mark in terms of live viewing, while hit streaming shows usually need a few days (or even weeks) to amass a sizable crowd. But the fight between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson was able to get tens of millions of Americans to all park themselves in front of their TV sets (or laptops) at the same time. No doubt the lure of seeing a 58-year-old icon such as Tyson step in the ring with a cocky upstart like Paul is the sort of sports event that would draw a crowd wherever it aired. But had this event been a pay-per-view event or even an over-the-air broadcast network, the audience would’ve been notably smaller. This fight drew the audience it did — both here and globally — because of its location. In the same way being on NBC’s Thursday night in the 1990s elevated almost any show that aired on the night, the Paul-Tyson fight’s culture cachet was increased because it was on Netflix.
While it was definitely a watershed for the streamer, last Friday can also be seen as a warning. Yes, Netflix got people to show up, and the fact that it was able to do so no doubt will be useful to the company’s efforts to convince advertisers to sell their wares on the service. Unfortunately, Netflix’s image also took a major hit because of how crappy the viewing experience was for so many customers. The streamer has already lost its luster, especially among younger viewers, over its crackdown on password sharing (a practice it once encouraged); its habit of rarely letting shows, even successful ones, run for more than a few dozen episodes; and for introducing commercials into what was once a proudly ad-free environment.
What Netflix always had over its competition, however, was that it just worked: quickly loading, rarely buffering (at least relative to its rivals), and just overall offering a superior viewing experience. That wasn’t the case last week. And even beyond the tech issues, the actual event itself turned out to be less than thrilling: Not only was the big fight meh, but it was preceded by hours of hype and promotional blather about other Netflix events that got slammed on social media. The streamer could have labeled all of that as a preshow, letting viewers know exactly when the main fight would start (and then actually having the fight start on time). But perhaps because it wanted to amass as many viewing minutes as possible, it directed audiences to show up at 8 p.m. ET for a bout that didn’t get underway until around midnight.
Obviously, no customer paid more for the ability to watch the fight, and I truly doubt anyone who’s been subscribing to Netflix for its shows and movies is going to suddenly cancel because it had buffering issues for a few hours. Netflix is not some janky upstart that needed to prove itself; it’s not going to be Fyre Festival’d out of business, even if Netflix execs have to be annoyed that they didn’t solve all their live-viewing gremlins after the aforementioned Love Is Blind finale fail. But co-CEO Ted Sarandos has often talked about how he and his fellow Netflix suits need to act as custodians of their members’ subscription fees — taking the $10, $15, or $20 per month folks pay for the streamer and then investing it in content that makes the service consistently better. If you just use audience size as the metric for success, then I suppose Sarandos will look at last week’s fight as a very smart bet that paid off. And maybe it was, particularly if he was hoping to use it as a calling card to attract future advertisers or demonstrate Netflix’s overall power.
Yet Netflix spent tens of millions for something that didn’t carry any traditional advertising and which will likely generate very little long-term viewing: People won’t be tuning in to this fight in big numbers for months and years to come the way they do with, say, old episodes of Outer Banks. The same thing is true with next month’s NFL games on Christmas Day (though at least in this case, the streamer will be selling advertising, recouping some of the money it spent to land its pigskin package). And if Netflix once again has trouble handling incoming traffic for those games, the outcry from fans will be five times as loud as last week. You do not mess with Americans and their football.
What’s more, every dollar spent on stunts like Paul-Tyson or even an NFL game is money that is not invested in shows or movies — the very bread and butter of Netflix. I absolutely think live events have a place on the platform, but they should either be relatively cost-effective (a reality show or talk/variety show, like the one John Mulaney did last May) or offer the prospect of long-tail viewing (a major concert or a stand-up special) or have the ability to keeps audiences coming back every week (the upcoming WWE deal). I’m not so sure one-offs like the fight or the NFL Christmas games really do that, even if they make a powerful statement about Netflix’s place in the media food chain.
