• Around 60 million households watched Jake Paul fights Mike Tyson on Netflix Friday evening.
• The match was vaguely unsettling: a 58-year-old man against a 27-year-old social media star.
• Jake Paul’s knack for attracting attention is undeniable, and that could be good for the sport of boxing.

Friday evening, 60 million households watched live Netflix as Jake Paul beat Mike Tyson in eight rounds of a boxing match. It was pure spectacle: a controversial social media star and an aging athlete who has been a part of pop culture for 30 years.

No one really knew what to expect: Would Iron Mike hit Paul, whose boxing career is mostly about influence rather than pure skill, or would Paul’s youth, 27, win out over the 58-year-old former champion?

But after the match, as Paul graciously showed deference to the veteran, a larger question remained unanswered: What did we just watch?

Even though I’m not personally a boxing fan, I connected. Everyone on my Bluesky feed seemed to be talking about it – the buzz was real. Even if Netflix suffered embarrassing issues with overloaded livestreamthis appears to be a real triumph for its forays into live sporting events.

However, the consensus that I observed on Blue sky (almost certainly from non-boxing fans like me) was that the whole thing had a vaguely tragic air with the older man losing to a potentially lesser – albeit younger – opponent. Tyson’s own comments when he was interviewed by a pre-teen before the fight had a gloomy vibe.

I underestimated Jake Paul before and I learned my lesson. In 2018, Paul started selling an online course on how to become an influencer. I paid for video lessons and I discovered that Paul didn’t just become successful through pranks and bad rap songs. He studied the platforms in a methodical and ruthless manner. He advised budding influencers the best time of day to post on YouTube (3 p.m.), shared that Musical.ly (before it became TikTok) was easy to game by posting frequently, and showed that a quick way to ‘Growing Snapchat audience was for putting your QR code in a Tinder profile.

He told some hard truths, like how Twitter was a good way to reach older people (ouch) – and that it was important to have a Facebook profile and page because older people who run brands likely to sponsor you were still on Facebook.

A key element that the Paul brothers and other early Vine stars learned that “collaborations” with other stars would significantly increase both audiences. This is still true across various platforms (notice how many video podcasters appear on other people’s podcasts). In a way, Paul vs. Tyson was simply the ultimate content “collaboration.”

Jake Paul can make his brain cells sound like the shaking of a can of Ax body spray. (In fact, he has his own line of body spray, called “W,” that he sprays all over himself whenever he’s on camera backstage before a match.) But he knows what he does: how to manipulate attention and the lucrative power it represents. attention can bring – more than you think.

Jake Paul’s relationship with the boxing world is a strange one. Clearly, his path to 60 million households watching on Friday night came from his fame as a social media influencer rather than climbing the boxing ranks. But he seems serious about the sport — you don’t fight Mike Tyson if you’re not — and there’s a positive way to view Friday’s show: By leveraging his influence and fame, he draws attention – and major prize money – for the boxing world. The $6 million purse for the women’s undercard match broadcast just before the Tyson fight was the largest sum ever for a women’s boxing prize.

It’s unclear where Jake Paul goes from here, or where boxing goes. Paul tweeted this weekend on how he continues to deal with his role as a disruptor in the sport. The direction that Netflix will take is quite clear: it will be showing two big NFL games on Christmas Day with Beyoncé as the halftime show. Hopefully this time they will be ready for a constant flow.

Correction: December 3, 2024 — Netflix said 60 million households watched the Paul-Tyson fight live, not 60 million people. An earlier version of this story misstated this figure.