• by Karl Greenberg , November 13, 2010

Boxing hasn't been a broadly disseminated sport since the advent of closed circuit TV. But while cable and pay-per-view via HBO and Showtime are still the main platforms for fight broadcasts, the Web is fast becoming the path around that Maginot Line both for fans of the sport and for the big promotional companies who are desperately seeking ways to popularize a sport that used to sell out stadiums.

Actually it's no coincidence that, as boxing is returning to stadiums -- Yankees Stadium in New York, and Cowboys Stadium in Dallas -- promoters are becoming a second conduit for video boxing content, both in the ring and out. When Top Rank-promoted Manny Pacquiao fought in Cowboys Stadium in March, the promoter re-launched TopRank.com to incorporate video streaming capabilities and integrated social media windows.

Todd DuBoef, president of the Las Vegas-based promoter says the goal is to bring back wide dissemination of boxing content, which, he concedes, has become exclusive and narrow. While the public's interest in boxing goes up and down based on cult of personality, controversy, and schadenfreude of tragedy, the pay-per-view system for broadcasting boxing matches limits content, sponsorship and marketing opportunities. "We have choked off content to consumers for many years," he tells Marketing Daily. "We have starved consumers of the product."

His goal with the new TopRank.com has been to create a rich-media hub with social-media tentacles that virtually reach millions on sites like Twitter and Facebook, and also link to fighters' social-media platforms. "Old media was 'I have content here's my platform, now the audience can come get it,'" he says. "What we are doing is 'I have content, and I'm going to bring it to the audience.'"

DuBoef, who now has a ten-person dedicated social-media team, says the goal is to both bring people to the hub and perfuse the social media universe with real-time 24/7 boxing content, while allowing social-media mavens to stay on TopRank.com while Tweeting about the fight.

"We have two goals," says DuBoef of the social-media integration. "Awareness of the PPV product, and a way to bring fans to a place where they can interact with other fans and see new video content." He says he has moved a big chunk of his media budget from traditional to online, "So now it's 50/50 when before only 15% of my budget was digital," he says adding that social media also carries a lot more weight than traditional advertising because it's global, and so is boxing, with the majority of PPV views coming from outside the U.S. "Manny Pacquiao has 100 million fans, and 561,000 of them are on Facebook.

DuBoef says social-media also lets Top Rank reach new demographics within the U.S. had have little awareness or interest in boxing. For example Top Rank made a deal with R&B star Nelly to perform his new hit just before Saturday night's main event between Pacquaio and Antonio Margarito. The artist Tweeted that he would do so to his own online fan base of some 850,000 and Top Rank re-Tweeted it and posted it to its pool of 1.5 million fans.

"On average, people are spending 11 to 15 minutes on the website," he says, explaining that Top Rank will stream the undercard fights that will not be televised tomorrow night, and because of the site's architecture fans can both watch the content and Tweet on it without leaving the URL. The social media team is running a "tailgate Tweet-Up" at Cowboys Stadium on Saturday around a “Tecate Fan Zone” grass roots effort.

Top Rank also has a mobile app for iPhone, Android and is looking to streaming Top Rank's video content to mobile. "We are looking at ways to encode video to iPhone, Android and Blackberry,"

What is all this doing for the fighter's own Facebook pages? Steve Rin, who runs social media at Top Rank -- which also has someone dedicated to Spanish language social media, says Puerto Rican star Juan Manuel Lopez' fan base has tripped since Top Rank linked its platform to his site. "His page was stagnant at 25,000," says Rin. "It's growth three times that size in three months. That's 30,000 new users per month."