The excellent news is that the near-official PPV buy rate numbers are in for UFC 184 and Ronda Rousey sold nearly 600,000 units. That is excellent given that the undercard offered her little to no support. Rousey is proving to be a star big enough to carry events on her own. If only they had someone to challenge her legitimately. The not so good news is that the following event, UFC 185, featuring a lot of big fights (Pettis/RDA, Hendricks/Brown, Nelson/Overeem, JJ/Esparza title fight) on what was described as a "stacked" card, sold less than half of what 184 did at about 275k. This suggests that the casual fans tuned in to see Rousey and didn't stick around the next month. A weak UFC 186 card featuring DJ and Supernova barely cracked 100k buys which means it's one of the worst performing PPV's even in a low period for the UFC. The way the UFC is trending, based on Dave Meltzer's estimations, points towards selling under 3-million PPV's this year, less than the last two years, both of which were considered borderline disastrous for the UFC. Losing Jon Jones (suspension) and Pettis (injury) won't help matters. Hopefully Cain Velasquez can compete a few times this year. http://www.f4wonline.com/
They need to go to a different model. Their PPV is dying. They should start putting bigger fights on Fox and see how that sticks.
For every 100k PPV's that's about $2.5-million in gross revenue. They are on pace to sell about 3MM PPV's this year which works out to about $75-million in PPV revenue (gross). The UFC on FOX deal is reportedly paying them upwards of $80-million per year for their televised events. Until FOX doubles their offer PPV won't go away. Maybe once the FOX deal is done someone will come along and offer to buy it all. The PPV business might be in rough shape in five or so years, though, based on the way things are going.
