There were a lot of people shocked when Dana White this past week told ESPN: The Magazine that UFC 92 (Forrest Griffin vs. Rashad Evans for light heavyweight title; Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira vs. Frank Mir for interim heavyweight title; Wanderlei Silva vs. Quinton Jackson) 12/27 beat UFC 91 (Brock Lesnar vs. Frank Mir) by 150,000 to 175,000 buys. Using his own numbers, although he declined in that interview to give a number, that would indicate 1.16 million to 1.185 million buys for a show that even internally before the show, those inside the company were talking about numbers barely more than half of that.
When it comes to PPV numbers, there are surprises to a degree, but never anything like this. While everyone expected UFC to do big numbers on 11/15, 12/27 and again on 1/31, the 12/27 show had figured to be the weakest of the three. When you talk all of the biggest buy numbers in the history of any genre, while predicting the actual numbers wasn’t always the easiest, every record setting show was known in advance it would likely set the record. In 2006, it was obvious Chuck Liddell vs. Randy Couture would set a record beforehand, as it was with Royce Gracie vs. Matt Hughes, Tito Ortiz vs. Ken Shamrock and Ortiz vs. Liddell. While in most cases, the actual numbers exceeded pre-show expectations, they were expected to set a new mark each time. The exception was Ortiz vs. Liddell, where the 1 million buy figure and even larger figures were thrown around beforehand. Since that show, nobody had expected any show to approach the Ortiz-Liddell level except the Couture vs. Brock Lesnar match, which appears to have finished in the same ballpark, but maybe very slightly underneath. There were expectations that the 1/31 show with Georges St. Pierre vs. B.J. Penn would do 600,000 to 800,000 buys even before the Lesnar numbers came in, but after the last two numbers have come in, White has already publicly claimed it would break the new record.
Immediately, when White said the number, it was met with mass skepticism, particularly within the boxing community which has always claimed UFC isn’t doing what is claimed. While they don’t always correlate, the fact UFC had to give away more than 4,000 tickets to fill the MGM Grand Garden Arena for the live event is hardly an indication of a show that supposedly did more buys than any Wrestlemania (based on North America) or the biggest UFC fights, and all but three non-heavyweight boxing matches in history.
Within the company, which never publicly releases numbers, we were told they were estimating 1.1 million to 1.2 million as the total buys, which would be only slightly below what Oscar De La Hoya vs. Manny Pacquiao did, and would have been the biggest non-boxing PPV event ever in North America, as no Wrestlemania has ever done 1 million buys in North America. It’s almost impossible to believe, given no pre-show factors indicated anything like that and how big De La Hoya vs. Pacquiao was mainstream compared to the media hype this event received.. There was no great momentum, in the sense of UFC ratings were slightly down when it came to the two specials on Spike in the weeks before the show, although using TV ratings to predict how PPV’s or overall business is doing when it comes to wrestling, MMA or boxing rarely yields much of a correlation. It’s also a number that almost nobody outside the UFC office seems to be anything but skeptical of.
The one thing that every cable source as well as trending patterns to indicate is the show was a huge success and blew away pre-show expectations. And even if it did very slightly less than UFC 91, which was the worst numbers that were out independently, that’s still a gigantic success. The show was either No. 1 or No. 2 for the year, and at worst, No. 3 of all-time.
Cable sources indicate the show did about the same numbers as UFC 91, perhaps very slightly lower. That show has been estimated at 1.01 million buys.
The indications are the show did not to anything close to record numbers in Canada, looking at being only fifth for 2008 in that country behind the shows headlined by Georges St. Pierre and Lesnar.
In comparing trending patterns, which usually are almost dead-on when it comes to predicting PPV numbers (except when Brock Lesnar fights for some reason), one set indicates, like the cable sources, almost identical numbers to UFC 91, and another indicates the numbers UFC claimed, numbers beating UFC 91 by a solid 10% or more and being the biggest UFC show of all-time. So the show almost surely did great, and there is at least some evidence this could be true.
It seems to be a lock that UFC in 2008 has set the all-time single year PPV record for any company. If the figures listed by White are accurate, the final North American PPV gross would be in the $290 million range for the year, breaking the WWE worldwide record mark of $260 million set in 2001 and the domestic mark of $255 million set last year by HBO Boxing. Even if we are conservative and say the show did slightly less than UFC 91, you are still talking in the $270 million range for the year. Keep in mind the company itself will see less than half that figure.
Based on trending patterns, the Rashad Evans vs. Forrest Griffin match was the top draw, with Quinton Jackson vs. Wanderlei Silva second and Frank Mir vs. Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, even with the 13 weeks of television building it up, a distant third. It’s pretty clear it was the combination of the three main events, as opposed to any singular match, that was the reason for the draw, as none of the matches (nor any match in UFC history) had close to the interest level based on trending numbers as Lesnar vs. Couture (which blew it out of the water as far as single match trending interest) or De La Hoya vs. Pacquiao.
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