Another record year for UFC on PPV
Boxers Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao produced the two biggest individual pay-per-view events of 2010. But with Brock Lesnar…
Boxers Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao produced the two biggest individual pay-per-view events of 2010. But with Brock Lesnar as the biggest overall draw, Zuffa LLC, the parent company of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, had its third consecutive record-setting year as the dominant force on the North American pay-per-view scene.
Zuffa is estimated by industry sources as doing 9,145,000 buys and generating $411 million in gross pay-per-view revenue on 16 events in 2010, including five that topped 750,000 buys. Those would consist of 15 events under the UFC banner and the lone World Extreme Cagefighting pay-per-view in April.
Lesnar fought twice over the past year, doing an estimated 2,100,000 buys combined for his main events against Shane Carwin on July 3 and his title loss to Cain Velasquez on October 23. In doing so, he became the second man in history to have two shows top 1 million buys in the same calendar year. The only other person to do so was Mike Tyson, who had three one million buy shows in 1996, in fights with Evander Holyfield, Frank Bruno and Bruce Seldon.
To show how impressive Lesnar’s totals were, his former employer, World Wrestling Entertainment, which had been the kings of monthly pay-per-views through 2005, only tallied 1,941,000 North American buys on its first 12 events of the year, with figures not yet reported for a December show. Based on recent numbers, that show would likely fall between 90,000-110,000. The wrestling company showed a steep decline from three million North American buys in 2008 and 2,593,000 in 2009.