Social Media Created Mayweather-McGregor

A story about how the Mayweather-McGregor fight came to fruition through social media engagement and market validation.

"Early days Connor wanted to do it, but it would be shot down by UFC, by members of the media, by whoever that just doubted it would ever happen. The banter between Connor and Floyd is really what allowed it to happen. Once they started going back and forth, you could actually see the level of engagement and interest from a market perspective and consumer perspective - it was hard to deny.

It was viable, it was a win-win scenario for all parties involved. The fans wanted it, the fighters wanted it, and the numbers were speaking for themselves from an analytics perspective. My job was to look at the data and see there's something very viable here.

It took UFC a while to come around, but eventually they did because they realized there was such amazing and intense interest around this event. It wasn't a gimmick - it was something everybody wanted to see. Credit to UFC too because it went against all their normal business practices, they'd never done something like that before.

Ultimately it was a huge success - over 4 million pay-per-view buys, and there were reports of hundreds of millions of illegal streams. We still did over 4 million buys even with all the piracy."