John Ourand of the Sports Business Journal reports that UFC 261 held this past Saturday drew more than 700,000 PPV buys on ESPN+. The event was the first in front of a live arena at the VyStar Arena in Jacksonville, Florida.
It was a triple-header of title fights with Kamaru Usman defending his welterweight title against Jorge Masvidal. Rosa Namajunas regained the women’s strawweight title against Weili Zhang and Valentina Shevchenko defeated Jessica Andrade.
UFC 261 drew over 2 million google searches on Saturday night making it the top search on the search engine. It was followed by Chris Weidman with over 1 million searches who suffered a horrifying leg injury in his fight with Uriah Hall. Rose Namajunas was number three who drew over 500,000 searches.
Payout Perspective:
The buy numbers from Ourand only account for ESPN+ purchases whereas in previous reports global PPV numbers were included. One might infer that when you include the global buys, this PPV will exceed 1 million buys. This card was very good and had title fights including a bitter rivalry at the top of the event which the company sold very well.
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