Netflix's Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight showed that getting attention is what Jake Paul does best

• Around 60 million households watched Jake Paul fight Mike Tyson on Netflix on Friday night.
• The matchup was vaguely unsettling — a 58-year-old against a 27-year-old social media star.
• Jake Paul's talent for attracting attention is undeniable, and that may be good for the sport of boxing.

On Friday night, 60 million households watched live on Netflix as Jake Paul beat Mike Tyson in eight rounds of a boxing match. It was a sheer spectacle: a controversial social media star and the aging athlete who has been a pop culture fixture for the last 30 years.

No one was really sure what to expect: Would Iron Mike wallop Paul, whose boxing career is mainly about clout rather than pure skill, or would the 27-year-old Paul's youth trump the 58-year-old former champion?

But after the match, as Paul graciously showed deference to the veteran, there was still a larger lingering question: What the hell did we just watch?

Even though I'm not personally a boxing fan, I tuned in. Everyone on my Bluesky feed seemed to be talking about it — the buzz was real. Even though Netflix suffered embarrassing glitches with an overloaded livestream, it seemed to be a real triumph for its forays into live sports events.

Still, the consensus I was seeing on Bluesky (almost certainly from non-boxing enthusiasts like myself) was that this whole thing had a vaguely tragic air with the older man losing to a potentially lesser — though younger — opponent. Tyson's own comments when he was interviewed by a tween before the fight had a morose vibe.

I've underestimated Jake Paul before, and I've learned my lesson. In 2018, Paul started selling an online course on how to be an influencer. I paid for the video courses and discovered that Paul hadn't just stumbled into success with pranks and bad rap songs. He studied platforms methodically and ruthlessly. He advised wannabe influencers on the best time of day to post to 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 grow a Snapchat audience was to put your QR code in a Tinder profile.

He told 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 the old people who run brands that might sponsor you were still on Facebook.

A key thing that the Paul brothers and other early Vine stars learned was that "collabs" with fellow stars would massively boost both audiences. This is still true across a variety of platforms (notice how many video podcasters appear on each other's podcasts). In a way, Paul vs. Tyson was simply the ultimate content "collab."

Jake Paul can give the impression that his brain cells sound like the shaking of a can of Axe body spray. (In fact, he has his own line of body spray, called "W," which he would spray all over himself whenever on camera backstage before a match.) But he knows what he's doing — how to manipulate attention and the lucrative power that attention can bring — much more than you might think.

Jake Paul's relationship with the boxing world is weird. Obviously, his path to 60 million households watching on Friday night came from his fame as a social media influencer rather than working his way up through the ranks of boxing. But he seems serious about the sport — you don't fight Mike Tyson if you're not — and there's a positive way of looking at Friday's spectacle: By leveraging his clout and fame, he's attracting attention — and big-money prizes — to the boxing world. The $6 million purse for the women's undercard match that aired just before the Tyson fight was the biggest amount ever for a women's boxing prize.

It's unclear where Jake Paul goes from here, or where boxing goes. Paul tweeted over the weekend about how he is still processing his role as a disruptor in the sport. It's pretty clear where Netflix goes: It'll be showing two big NFL games on Christmas Day with Beyoncé as the half-time show. Hopefully, this time, they'll be prepared for a steady stream.

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