There’s a specific kind of audacity required to watch someone else kick down a door, walk through it behind them, and then tell everyone you invented doors. Jake Paul has that audacity in surplus.
On July 14, Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions announced that Amanda Serrano’s August 21 return against Lucrecia Manzur — for the unified WBA and WBO women’s featherweight titles — would stream exclusively on TikTok. Paul framed it as a breakthrough. “A constant pursuit of disruption,” he wrote on Twitter. “While they all do the same, we create new lanes that they follow.”
Except someone else already built that lane. Six weeks earlier, on June 27, Bare Knuckle Boxing (BKB) streamed its BKB 55 preliminary card live on TikTok from Cardiff, Wales — a first-of-its-kind partnership for any combat sports promotion, and for sports on the platform generally. The feed didn’t just work. It posted the highest watch time of any sports platform in TikTok live sports history. BKB also registered five times higher engagement than traditional boxing on the app.
So when Paul says “we create new lanes that they follow,” the timeline is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
BKB CEO David Tetreault didn’t mince words when asked about the partnership’s results. “Our partnership with TikTok has exceeded every expectation,” he told MMAmania.com. “It introduced bare knuckle boxing to a massive new audience and showed what’s possible when a combat sports promotion fully embraces digital platforms. As the first combat sports organization to partner with TikTok, we also delivered the most-watched live sporting event in the platform’s history.”
Tetreault’s most telling line: “We put BKB in front of tens of millions of people who had never seen our product before.” That’s the real story — not the novelty of TikTok as a broadcast medium, but the audience math. A bare knuckle outfit from the fringes of combat sports outdrew every traditional sports property that had touched the platform, and did it with a prelim card from Wales.
BKB isn’t treating June 27 as a one-off. The promotion returns to the model this Saturday, July 18, with BKB 56 prelims streaming on TikTok from The Novo at LA Live in Los Angeles. The main card airs at 7 p.m. PT on VICE TV in the U.S. and Canada, and on talkSPORT in the UK and Ireland. The lineup features recognizable boxing names — Victor Ortiz, Jojo Diaz, Alfredo Angulo — crossing into bare knuckle, a roster play designed to pull crossover viewers who might not yet know the BKB product but know those fighters from gloved careers.
Meanwhile, Paul’s MVP is pushing the Serrano-Manzur card as a historic moment for women’s boxing and digital broadcasting simultaneously. Serrano is one of the most accomplished female fighters in the sport’s history, and putting her on TikTok-exclusive streaming will reach a demographic that traditional boxing pay-per-views rarely touch. None of that is in dispute. The dispute is about provenance — who actually broke the ground, and who’s standing on it claiming they laid the foundation.
The numbers say BKB got there first, and the numbers are not close. Highest watch time in TikTok live sports history. Five times the engagement of traditional boxing. First combat sports promotion on the platform. All achieved on a Friday night in Cardiff with a preliminary card.
Paul’s gift has always been turning volume into leverage. He didn’t invent influencer boxing, but he scaled it. He didn’t build women’s boxing, but he’s platforming it. And he didn’t pioneer TikTok live sports streaming — BKB did, with a bare knuckle card from Wales that nobody saw coming until everybody was watching.
Serrano versus Manzur on August 21 will likely draw well. It may even set its own records. But the lane was already open, and the people who opened it are still standing in it on July 18, streaming from LA Live, with Victor Ortiz on the card and a point to make.