Mayweather vs. Pacquiao Reportedly Generated $600 Million in Revenue

What do you get when a boxer enters the ring with a torn rotator cuff and hardly resembles the dominant fighter of old and his opponent dances and jabs his way to a defensive, cautious and utterly boring unanimous decision?

If the first boxer is Manny Pacquiao and the second boxer is Floyd Mayweather Jr., well, you get about $600 million in revenue from the fight, according to Kurt Badenhausen of Forbes:

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The Mayweather-Pacquiao fight will generate $600 million in total once everything is counted from tickets, PPV, sponsorships, merchandise, closed-circuit and international rights. It was a record tally for a one-day sporting event and triple the previous high for a fight. The only thing comparable is the Super Bowl, which produced $500 million in revenue last year and ranks annually as the world’s most valuable sporting event brand.

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The biggest revenue generator, according to Badenhausen, was the pay-per-view buys. According to his report, the fight garnered "4.4 million PPV buys in the U.S. and 700,000 in the U.K." At $100 a pop for the HD broadcast, the PPV revenue alone came in at about $430 million.

“We were expecting three million U.S. homes,” Top Rank chief Bob Arum told Badenhausen. Suffice to say, the fight more than met his expectations, at least from a financial perspective.

The boxers have to be pleased as well, with Pacquiao clearing $125 million for the fight and Mayweather raking in a whopping $240 million. It's the primary reason why it's hard to believe the two won't face off in a rematch, especially since they can market the second fight as the true measuring stick between the two fighters, assuming Pacquiao is back to full strength. 

The only people who really lost out? The fans, who paid record amounts to watch what many people considered to be a dud of a matchup. That could be the primary deterrent to any rematch, as many fans won't will be have lost interest after the first bout disappointed, though of course plenty more folks will be intrigued to know how a healthy Pacquiao fares against Mayweather.