He may have ended up losing but the Conor McGregor effect was alive and well for UFC 196.
Nobody can bring eyes to a fight quite like ‘The Notorious’ and when you add a Diaz brother to the equation, it makes for the perfect storm.
The promotion may have worried when Rafael dos Anjos pulled out of UFC 196 with 11 days to go until fight night, meaning that McGregor would no longer be fighting for a title on March 5.
There was a genuine possibility that pay-per-view buys would have been significantly hindered by the card switch-up and while the official buyrate is not yet known, many statistics are proving that it was an unbridled success.
The promotion released a number of figures on Friday, six days after the final buzzer rang, and despite our scepticism at their projection “to be the highest PPV event in UFC history,” the numbers are indeed impressive.
The UFC pay-per-view prelims which were headlined by a welterweight meeting between Siyar Bahadurzada and Brandon Thatch, drew in the second highest average viewership in Fox Sports 1 history at an average of 1.8 million viewers.
The early prelims, which included the incredible lightweight clash between Diego Sanchez and Jim Miller, “set the record for new subscribers and viewership for the UFC Fight Pass early prelims.”
Embedded figures also improved, with the UFC 196 series earning a record 4.9 million views.
On Twitter, UFC 196 turned out to be the top sporting event for the week of 29/2 to 5/3 and also the top event for Saturday 5/3 alone. The @UFC handle was the most engaged sports brand on Twitter for that same week.
The week also led to the UFC’s Facebook and Instagram earning almost 100,000 new followers, according to a press release from the promotion.
And in terms of traffic being directed towards UFC.com, UFC 196 was, yet again, responsible for the setting of a new record.
The top-selling UFC pay-per-view in history was UFC 100 which had a buyrate of 1.6m and while UFC president Dana White is hopeful of breaking that record when the final figures come through, we have a feeling they may just fall short of the mark.
