UFC/MMA Discussion Thread - Page 53

On January 25 2016 15:23 GreenHorizons wrote:
Starting off 2016 with a prediction.
Everyone except Johnson and McGregor lose their title this year.

As far as business is concerned, all early indications are strong. Even through doing almost no promotional work, the story of Rousey fighting after 13 months seemed to intrigue people in the end. Ticket sales started off slow. Usually UFC sells most of its tickets right off the bat. Yet, a few weeks out sales picked up big and we were told they were going to legitimately sell out. They ended up with a Las Vegas record, a sellout reported as 18,533 for $4.75 million. Tickets were priced much cheaper than McGregor fights or UFC 200, and the gate was nowhere close to those shows.
Early PPV reports, sketchy at this point because of the holiday, were very strong. Reports from sports bars were that they were largely packed, perhaps not at the peak of Rousey’s fights with Bethe Correia or Holm, but at or ahead of McGregor levels outside of McGregor strongholds like strong Irish areas. And the audience was different, with a far higher percentage of women. Google searches regarding the show itself were slightly ahead of UFC 205. Google searches relating to everything UFC (which are traditionally not a great PPV indicator, as only individual show searches correlate well with PPV numbers) over the weekend were ahead of everything except the Rousey-Holm fight, as Rousey alone had 10 million searches on Thursday and Friday.
Based on very early estimates the thing is looking at 1.1 million, but this year those numbers have usually ended up being 20 percent high on the big shows. However, unlike with McGregor, where early estimates are high, especially those done of iPPV, Rousey buyers by not being as likely to order on the internet, her last three fights did pretty much identical numbers to what we had midweek after the fight.
The scary part is this was a Friday and that was going to hurt. With Brock Lesnar vs. Alistair Overeem, the Google search metric that is usually accurate had that fight at what would have been nearly 800,000 when it did 540,000, and other trends also showed just how far off being on Friday hurt. The same thing happened here, as this was 19 percent ahead of McGregor vs. Diaz II, which is the all-time record holder and 27 percent ahead of UFC 205 and 23 percent ahead of the first McGregor vs. Diaz. It was far ahead of Rousey vs. Holm (which ended up doing 1,090,000) for a Rousey vs. Rousey comparison so you can’t say well it’s just Rousey fights being better than McGregor in a metric that wouldn’t translate to a buy number, when actually it’s a great predictor. If it was on a normal Saturday without huge college football competition, this probably would have broken the record. If she and Amanda Nunes had promoted it at all, even on a Friday against the Orange Bowl, the number would have been considerably higher. But neither did, Rousey because she refused and Nunes because Rousey didn’t.

UFC president Dana White has made an official offer for Floyd Mayweather to fight UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor in a boxing match.

On Friday, White went on Colin Cowherd’s "The Herd" to offer Mayweather $25 million to fight McGregor in a boxing match, and he’s willing to sit and negotiate the split of the pay-per-view. White also said that McGregor would also be paid $25 million for the fight.

“I’ll tell you what Floyd, here’s a real offer, and I’m the guy who can actually make the offer, and I’m actually making a real offer,” White said. “We’ll pay you 25 million, we’ll pay Conor 25 million, and then well talk pay-per-view and a certain number. There is a real offer.”