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Home » YouTube flagged as illegal Joshua v Ruiz streams cost Sky Sports £20m

YouTube flagged as illegal Joshua v Ruiz streams cost Sky Sports £20m

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  • 2 min read

Anthony Joshua’s fight with Andy Ruiz in New York on June 1 has been named as the most illegally streamed showing since records began.

The clash, in which Joshua was dropped four times on his way to losing four heavyweight titles to Ruiz, was showed legally on DAZN in the USA and Sky Sports Box Office in the UK.

Muso, who have taken the reigns of counting pirated activity for such events, revealed their figures to the public domain this week.

Their findings say a total of THIRTEEN million people across the world had unlicensed access to Joshua v Ruiz Jr.

The British shared was tracked at over 900,000. The worst culprits were Joshua’s native Nigeria, where over TWO and a QUARTER million viewers did not pay for the privilege.

Kenya was second, closer to a million than the UK.

Joshua v Ruiz smashed the record previously held by Tyson Fury v Deontay Wilder. The December encounter was streamed by almost TEN million.

Andy Chatterley, CEO and co-founder of MUSO, gave his views on the shocking results.

“We saw how popular the Fury vs. Wilder fight was across piracy networks just six months ago. How a significant part of the audience was coming in through YouTube,” he said.

“The Joshua vs. Ruiz fight has been the largest unauthorized audience that we’ve ever tracked across boxing. It’s staggering to see that 93% of the audience watched via YouTube.

“The official Pay Per View audience figures have yet to be published. But this is a massive audience that’s being ignored.

“This highly engaged audience offers up huge insight and perhaps, more importantly, significant commercial opportunity.”


PPV

DAZN and Sky Sports will be tearing their hair out over the numbers as a potential pot in the tens of millions of pounds has been lost.

Charging up to $19.95 per month, DAZN were hoping adding Joshua would lead to a mass of sign-ups. WBN can state this has not been the case.

Sky Sports Box Office, on the other hand, have lost almost TWENTY million pounds in revenue as they offer Joshua PPV’s at £19.95 per buy.