So much is being made of online metrics and how that popularity translates to hard money, it’s why we hear boxers and media types spouting off about followers, views, “peak averages” (whatever that means) and how all this relates to matchmaking, network deals, pay-per-view splits or even just something to back up the bravado.
The reality is that many of these numbers do not give the full picture regarding popularity and marketability. How engaged is a Twitter follower versus one from Instagram or how much is more is a premium cable TV viewer worth more than a terrestrial broadcast viewer? Don’t even get me started on DAZN and their completely opaque disclosures – nobody knows what they’re doing, just that they’re throwing a lot of money around to make fights. Is it a loss leader strategy? It doesn’t matter.
The point to all this is that we should take all this numbers talk with a grain of salt. But that doesn’t mean we can look at broad trends and have a little fun drawing our own conclusions. And with that I present you Google Trends:
Google Trends is a website by Google that analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages – Wikipedia
So let’s throw some boxing queries into the mix and see what happens… and what better division to start with than the red hot lightweight division.
Without getting into the data itself there’s an inconsistency right off the bat. Everyone except Devin Haney is recognized as it’s own category, meaning related news stories will be aggregated into the data whereas for Mr. Haney, we’ll only be comparing to the actual search term “Devin Haney.” Now, on to the trends themselves. For this exercise we’re looking just one year back and for the United States only.
Gervonta Davis features the biggest trend spikes by far and it’s not just recency bias from his headlining fight vs Gamboa in Atlanta either, his 2nd round KO against Ricardo Nunez resulted in the next highest trending event between these five as well.
Unified champion Vasyl Lomachenko is next with the 2nd and 4th highest trending events which shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise since he’s not fought at a pay-per-view level and is not exactly a big personality in boxing, usually electing to let his body of work do most of the talking.
Ryan Garcia is just behind Lomachenko and while he’s still coming up in the boxing world, he’s well known to be savvy with social media and is no doubt a future star barring any major hiccups in his development.
Lastly we’ve got Teofimo Lopez edging ahead of the Devin Haney. Both are ahead of Garcia in their boxing development having captured different versions of world titles but are lacking Garcia’s out of ring popularity.
What do we learn from all this? Davis, Garcia and to a lesser extent Lopez all trended up over the course of the last 12 months but Davis clearly has the highest ceiling in terms of commercial success… again, according to this Google Trends report. Haney seems relatively flat but he’s cashing those DAZN cheques so probably doesn’t care as much about the long term. Davis is already positioned as a future star in PBC, Garcia has leveraged his popularity into a new deal with Golden Boy and Lopez is about to head into a massive clash against Lomachenko. It will certainly be interested tracking the interest of the winner and loser of that bout. Lopez will have plenty of time to recover but for Lomachenko, it could be the beginning of the end to an illustrious career.
