When both Jose Aldo and Rampage Jackson went down with injuries, the UFC responded with replacement fights and fighters. No thang there, they’re used to it, and they’re good at it. They scrapped the main event and replaced it with Anderson Silva vs Stephan Bonnar. For the co-main, they called upon Fabio Maldonado to step in and face Glover Teixeira. Not exactly the greatest lineup in the world, but they saved the event. The question is: Is it still worth the same price?

Kudos to the UFC. Given the extreme circumstances of losing two headlining fighters in a single day, they did a good job of salvaging the show. But let’s be honest here, Silva vs Bonnar is a pretty sucky main event, at least at $50. And Teixeira was only in the co-main event because he was fighting Rampage – a proven draw. Their PPV sales are going to suffer greatly because of this.

This is exactly why the UFC needs a pricing structure based on the product they’re offering. Every UFC pay per view is priced the same. The reason is because they’ve built their business on the UFC brand, not any one particular fighter. It’s the anti-boxing strategy and has worked wonders for them. But now that their PPV business is stagnant, and with all the shuffled events as of late, they need to price accordingly. Take UFC 147 for example – Wanderlei Silva vs Rich Franklin II. They offered a weak product to consumers and sold only 140,000 PPV’s. UFC 148 had a blockbuster main event and sold a million.

If they priced events according to quality they’d see higher sales. Maybe they’d experience a temporary lag in immediate revenue, but they’d be exposing more people to their product. Make no mistake about it, consumers pick and choose their purchases. The UFC is relying on Anderson Silva to carry this card, but the casual fan is going to say, Who’s Silva fighting? Bonnar? Get the f@$% outta here and they’re going to decline to make that purchase at $50. At $29.99 though, maybe they say, Yeah why not, and buy it.

If there’s one absolute truth to economic theory it’s that people respond to incentives. Offering a s#!^ card at the same price as a great card is no incentive to buy. Consumers don’t care that you made a valiant effort to save the show. They care that they have some loot left over for beer and wings.

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