Boxing ended 2025 with a knockout.
Not literally—the November fight between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson didn’t have quite that much action—but the viewership packed a punch for Netflix, with 65 million concurrent streams at the event’s peak, and more than 1.4 billion impressions on Netflix’s social channels, according to the streamer. The hashtag #PaulTyson also trended worldwide on X, and even those who don’t use the platform may have seen posts about it in other social feeds or heard talk of it in a sports bar.
It was a rare breakthrough moment for boxing, which, despite having a handful of major global stars and a growing cohort of influencer boxers, largely lacks the household names and regular cultural moments that make sports, like football and basketball, a lock for big brands.
“It got everyone talking about boxing,” said Michael Mobley, SVP of media at Dazn, a sports streaming and entertainment platform that offers boxing.
In the months after Paul vs. Tyson especially, the sport’s traditional players experienced something of a trickle-down effect, seeing boosts in audience engagement and fielding calls from interested advertisers.
“It’s helped us across our social platforms,” Brian Kelly, CRO of the boxing production and promotion company Top Rank, told Marketing Brew. “We saw fan engagements around that fight, after that fight, increase. We saw some follower growth as well. It was such a sports cultural moment. Boxing isn’t always thought of as the big four in the United States when it comes to sports consumption and sports investment, but that certainly had an impact.”
Rising tide lifts all boats ropes
Ahead of the breakthrough moment, boxing was already building a passionate fanbase. The sport is particularly popular among Black and Hispanic communities, which has been appealing to sponsors, Kelly said, and Top Rank saw a 35% increase in brand partnerships from 2023 to 2024, with brands testing the sport renewing at a rate of about 85%.
The viewership of the Paul vs. Tyson fight encouraged more marketers to reach out in recent months, he added. Twisted Tea tested out the sport by activating at a handful of Top Rank fights in 2024, and this year, it renewed its deal, becoming its official malt beverage partner for 2025, Senior Brand Director Erica Taylor said. Twisted Tea got involved with boxing because it’s a passion point for some of its consumers and employees, Taylor said.
While she acknowledged boxing is “certainly different” than other sports sponsorships, the bottom line is that “it’s a way to reach our audience,” she said.
The reasoning is similar at Miller Lite, which became the official beer partner of Top Rank in December: “Over the last few years, the sport has seen growing viewership numbers across the board,” Rose Sokolnik, senior brand manager for Miller Lite activation, told us. “This bolstered our confidence that boxing’s popularity was also growing among Miller Lite consumers.”
Get marketing news you'll actually want to read
Marketing Brew informs marketing pros of the latest on brand strategy, social media, and ad tech via our weekday newsletter, virtual events, marketing conferences, and digital guides.
Mobley said beer and alcohol brands are common boxing sponsors, but he noted that in recent years, there’s been an uptick in interest from other categories like auto, movie studios, and gaming.
Next round
This year, boxing companies are looking to maintain momentum. Boxing has historically relied on a pay-per-view model to give fans access to fights, but purchases alone aren’t necessarily the most relevant metric to sponsors, so even before Netflix’s move into the sport, boxing had been shifting to streaming and social, partly to attract advertisers, Mobley said.
Top Rank has a deal with ESPN, first struck in 2017, that distributes fights on ESPN+, and Dazn, which offers pay-per-view fights, has become increasingly focused on metrics like engagement with social content over pay-per-view buys, Mobley said. Big fighters like Canelo can draw anywhere from 5 million to 15 million views on highlight videos on YouTube, and also tend to trend on other platforms, he said.
“Those were all channels that the traditional promoters didn’t necessarily have,” Mobley said. “They’re starting to catch up.”
Top Rank still offers traditional boxing inventory like logo placements on the canvas, corner pads, and ropes, but it’s working to provide sponsors with other opportunities like experiential activations and social content creation, Kelly said.
“We’re really taking the full scope of our assets and our IP and bringing that to brands in a full-funnel way where they can connect with our consumer and our fan at every different touchpoint, whether they’re watching us on linear and streaming or just consuming us on social or YouTube, just like the way that the other major leagues are really embracing their assets,” he said.
Though some marketers seem to have a bigger appetite for boxing in 2025, the sponsorship landscape still isn’t as developed as a league like the NFL, where some brands sign decades-long deals worth billions of dollars. At Top Rank, the typical deal length is about one to three years as sponsors test out the sport, Kelly said, adding that some do renew for longer, more expensive contracts.
“It’s still what some would consider a somewhat niche area for advertisers, but we’ve seen it grow pretty consistently over six, seven years,” Mobley said. “Does it take over the NFL? Probably not. But the more people watch it, and the more educated they get on it, the more excited [they get]...Everybody likes a fight.”