UFC 254 drew 675,000 buys worldwide according to sources obtained by John Ourand of the Sports Business Journal. Per SBJ, 500,000 buys were attributed to U.S. purchases on ESPN+ putting it 5th in PPV buys for 2020.
UFC 254 featured Khabib Nurmagomedov and Justin Gaethje with Khabib winning in the 2nd round and promptly retiring after the match. The event took place at 2:00pm ET to fall in line with the Abu Dhabi time zone so that more fans in that region could watch during the evening.
Notably, Dana White stated that it was tracking higher than Khabib-Conor. Of course, the numbers reflect that the tracking cited by White was way off.
SBJ listed the top grossing PPV buys for 2020:
- UFC 251 1.3M Masvidal-Usman
- UFC 246 1 Million McGregor-Cerrone
- UFC 253 700K Adesanysa-Costa
- UFC 249 700K Gaethje-Ferguson
Payout Perspective:
The buy rate is pretty good considering it aired during the day in the US and competed with college football. The prelim ratings on ESPN2 were above just above 300,000 which might infer that the buy rate would not exceed 1 million U.S.
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