Despite Turki Alalshikh’s takeover of The Ring having come paired with a lot of fanfare, high-quality marketing productions and an overhaul of The Ring from a magazine/online website to that of a psuedo-promoter and media powerhouse, there are still some wrinkles in the way The Ring presents itself.
The Ring’s second sponsored [or promoted, though The Ring can not operate officially as promotion] May 2nd card became a disaster for entertainment as both the co-main event, held between Devin Haney and Jose Carlos Ramirez, and main event between Rolando Romero and Ryan Garcia made boxing history by becoming 12-round fights with respectively the 3rd and 4th fewest-thrown punches recorded.
This starkly contrasted the April 26th card headlined by Chris Eubank Jr. and Conor Benn, with the main event becoming a competitive success in the sport.
Profit-wise, both cards seemed to do very well, as highlighted by The Ring who would proudly proceed to reveal both cards had totaled around 116.6 billion “impressions”. Impressions refer to the number of times content is displayed or seen, regardless of whether it is clicked or engaged with.
In this case, with The Ring stating that their cards “totaled around 116.6 billion impressions”, they are referring to the combined total number of times promotional material, social media posts, video clips, articles, or advertisements related to the events appeared in users’ feeds or screens across all platforms (such as Twitter/X, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, websites, etc.).
Obviously, this does not mean 116 billion people watched the fight, but that anything associated with the fight, from posts to video clips, were observed 116 billion times. This includes just one person watching a video or seeing a post multiple times; statistics that The Ring conveniently left out.
Pertaining to the Twitter/X platform, the viewing of a post, after all, that comes across a social media feed does not actually mean the person actually clicked on the post and read it in full. The same goes for video clips and such, marking what is essentially a statistic that doesn’t at all point out the true level of engagement social media users had with the two aforementioned cards, and further fails to substantiate on what the actual commercial success of both shows were.
In line with the same sort of flash and grandeur that surrounds other Turki Alalshikh-led shows such as Riyadh Season’s fight cards, a lot of the exaggeration can directly be contributed to the Saudi chairman of the General Entertainment Authority (GEA) himself.
Business partner Dana White would allude to this exaggeration when he debunked that the league he was forming with Turki Alalshikh was not a league at all but a boxing promotion. Notably, Alalshikh had referred to their venture as a league, exaggerations which seem to have now trickled down to The Ring which Alalshikh currently owns.
In truth, without specific data from the various social media platforms through which The Ring has claimed their impression totals, there is little stock that can be taken in such statistics ― as evident in the example of a viewer seeing a post multiple times.
What The Ring does seem to do well following its acquisition by Turki Alalshikh is promote itself as a media conglomerate of sorts, with the approximate 116.6 billion views giving many the sense that The Ring is one of the most prominent media platforms in the world.
The May 2nd Romero-Garcia card was proof that prominent marketing does not always result in the best of shows, and a degree of truth might perhaps benefit The Ring more than an exaggeration.
However, with The Ring likely profiting more from the amount of effort they put in embellishing their promotional material and statistics, it is unlikely the company will drift away towards presenting genuine data that better reflects the attention both shows received.
Such exaggerating does explain a lot about The Ring’s new direction as both cards probably did well, and draws an uncanny and quite disturbing parallels with Premier Boxing Champions (PBC) who have used similar strategies to draw attention to their cards while also operating as a psuedo-promotional entity.
