The final pay-per-view figures for 2016 have been tallied and all records have been broken.
We had a pretty good idea, near the end of last year, that the UFC was going to set a new high in terms of PPV buys.
UFC 206, headlined by the hastily arranged Max Holloway vs. Anthony Pettis interim featherweight title fight, did not exactly tip the scale but UFC 207 did. The December 30 event was headlined by Ronda Rousey’s comeback against women’s bantamweight champion and it brought in over 1.1m PPV buys.
That superb end to the year saw the promotion end with an approximate PPV buys of 8,370,000. Five of its 13 shows in 2016 breached the 1m PPV mark.
UFC 207 and the highly publicised UFC 200 were numbers four and five in the best performing PPV list. The other three were headlined by one Conor McGregor.
‘The Notorious’ racked up a whopping 4,217,000 PPV buys for UFC 196, 202 and 205. The biggest UFC pay-per-view event of all time was UFC 202, with McGregor taking on Nate Diaz, for a second time, in the main event.
All told, McGregor-headlined events took in a gargantuan 50.3% of all the year’s PPV buys.
McGregor’s lightweight title win over Eddie Alvarez at UFC 205 shattered MMA and Madison Square Garden gate records by taking in a whopping $17.7m.
In his analysis of the year’s big events, MMA Fighting’s Dave Meltzer points out how badly some title fight main events suffered in comparison to the fights with star-power and compelling back stories. He notes:
‘Never have the individual stars, in this case McGregor, Rousey and possibly Brock Lesnar, meant more, and never have solid championship fights meant less.’
Meltzer recalls that 2016 was the year when the promotion’s first ever PPV take of over 2m was talked up. The best chance of that happening was at the stacked UFC 200 but all such hopes of that went south when Rousey steered clear, McGregor was removed from the card and Jon Jones missed out after an anti-doping violation.
The chances of the UFC surpassing, or even equalling, 2016’s stellar figures look set to suffer. Rousey and Lesnar may not fight again, CM Punk [another big draw] was badly beaten in his promotional debut and McGregor is not back until July or August.
