2023 Fight Scores numbers update

It's been a few years since I last looked at the numbers for my iOS app Fight Scores. As I was preparing for a fairly major feature release for it over the Christmas period, I figured now was a good time to revisit and see how healthy it is. As a disclaimer, Fight Scores is purely a passion project for me, I improve it and maintain it not to make money, but because I enjoy it and truly think that the boxing industry needs to have better technology.

Well… probably the less said about these numbers the better! I operate under a trust-based system, if you enjoy using the app and would like to show your gratitude, there is a tip jar, however I don’t ask for tips and it’s certainly not expected. The current cost of running Fight Scores is about $200 a year. I currently run everything on a cheap Linode shared machine but will be moving away from them as soon as I have time in 2024. I’ve had some truly stressful situations occur over the last few years with Fight Scores going down without warning or assistance, and they’ve all been caused by Linode’s decline into ineptitude with regards to security and customer support.

Moving on to look at new user trends and I'm pleased to see that it shows really healthy growth. I’ve learned since my last numbers post that the 2017 total was largely due to a huge spike in downloads from China, most of which didn’t ever create a scorecard so can be ruled out as useful. Since then we see a slight decline in signups before very healthy growth over the last two years and a 60% increase in the last year. I largely put this down to 2023 being a really healthy year of boxing events, but its still great to see.

Again, I assign most of the 30% increase in fights created on Fight Scores down to the fantastic year of boxing that we’ve had. Very few weekends have been empty and fans for been treated to some truly "mega" fights. That said, it’s really exciting to see the general direction of travel here. In 2021 we released scheduled fights, which made is so much easier for users to score fights, I think that, and other incremental improvements, had a big influence on these numbers.

The state of boxing

On to the boxing itself, and as I’ve mentioned, its been an eventful year. From a pure fan's perspective, 2023 was just a great year from start to finish, we saw an early blockbuster in Tank Davis vs Ryan Garcia. Then we had the summer week that included the long awaited Crawford vs Spence fight taking place within days of a flyweight unification between Inoue and Fulton, before ending the year with a heavyweight bang in Saudi Arabia with the Day of Reckoning. In between all of that were a healthy number of genuinely solid matchups and plenty of questionable crossover shows ranging from Jake Paul, KSI, and Tommy Fury, through to the heavyweight Champion of the world surviving an almighty scare against someone making their boxing debut.

The most popular fight of 2023 might surprise you though. It was the fight ending in a highly controversial decision between Devin Haney and Vasyl Lomachenko back in May.

Looking at the all time list of most popular fights, you can see that 2023 had 4 of the top 10, thats a hugely healthy statistic both for the sport of boxing and for Fight Scores as an app.

Thanks to all of our users and here's to an even better 2024!