John Ourand of the Sports Business Journal reports that UFC 252 drew 500,000 worldwide PPV buys per his sources. An estimation of the U.S. figure is at 400,000 for the event featuring Stipe Miocic and Daniel Cormier.
Saturday night Miocic and Cormier met in the trilogy with the champion retaining the belt and Cormier retiring. The
UFC 226 drew 380,000 PPV buys in July 2018. There was no official PPV buy rate released for the return bout at UFC 241 a year and a month later in Anaheim although one would think that it would have done well considering Nate Diaz returned after a two year absence on that card.
The buy rate reflects a healthy return for the company on PPV during this pandemic. While the heavyweight trilogy did not produce an astronomical figure like UFC 251’s 1.3M global (estimated 900K buys) or UFC 249’s 700K buys, it is a good number.
It should be noted that Disney announced that it would raise the subscription rates on ESPN+ where everyone must purchase the PPVs. Regardless, people still paid to see the fights.
Notably, the UFC produced over 2M google searches online on Saturday and the 3-hour prelims on ESPN was first overall in cable. It also topped all of the important young demos that advertisers covet.
At a time when other sports are struggling on seeing a financial return during the pandemic, the UFC is doing good business.
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