Meltzer analyzes worst PPV buy rates since 2006

What explains the 2011 decrease in UFC pay-per-view purchases and where are matters headed in 2012? The top industry expert, Yahoo! Sports’ Dave Meltzer, talks to Luke Thomas on MMA Nation on 106.7 The Fan. In sum, Meltzer identifies a freight train of issues driving down PPV rates including illegal streams, two weeks between PPVs, promoting lower weight championships over more compelling fights, the free to PPV ratio, and the lack of massive fights.

Luke Thomas: UFC 136 was estimated by you to have done approximately 250,000 pay-per-view buys. Is that number still accurate because I know it’s provisional and more importantly, why did it do so poorly in your judgement?

Dave Meltzer: I would say the estimate right now is 225-250. There’s a lot of reasons, I don’t think there’s one prevailing reason.

I actually did a survey on my own website asking people who usually buy why they didn’t and web streaming came up as the strongest reason but there were other reasons.

The other strong reasons had to do with the card itself not so much with Edgar and Maynard but just this idea of lack of star power on the card even though I actually thought the card was deeper than most and just basically the overall card itself didn’t intrigue people. I think Edgar and Maynard wasn’t a match that people go out of their way to see. The second match was great, the draw was a debatable decision so it made sense to bring it back obviously but, and again, I think Edgar and Anthony Pettis, I don’t know if it would have done any better or any worse, I just think that Edgar as champion, Edgar as champion is not a draw. Maybe he will at some point but he’s not right now and Maynard as challenger wasn’t a draw.

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I think two weeks between shows hurt … I think that when you have two shows really close together and one’s a real big one, the second one is going to get hurt. I don’t know that 135 was a real big one, but it was a bigger one than this one … think three weeks should be a minimum. I know the way they’ve got their schedule done but I think they paid the price for that. I don’t think people are ready. You don’t see the commercials for that one. You’re just getting done with one show and now you get two weeks of commercials, I think you probably need more than two weeks, you probably need three weeks to build up a fight.

Also, Aldo and Florian, the reality is, we all knew going into this year that featherweights and bantamweights weren’t going to draw at first. They have to establish the guys as stars and they have to kind of establish the weight class.

I was thinking that two championship matches, that’s pretty strong. Sonnen and Brian Stann at the top is actually stronger than most but the reality is people didn’t see either of those title matches as being that strong and Sonnen versus Stann wasn’t really promoted that hard because all the focal points were on the two title matches. Aldo, I think people don’t know Jose Aldo. I know he’s super talented but they just don’t know him yet and they’re not really into that championship.

I don’t know that promoting Stann and Sonnen harder would have made a difference, but I do know from the anecdotal and end poll that I did on my own site, the fight that people were most interested in was Sonnen and Stann and not Edgar and Maynard.

To me, that is kinda evidence that sometimes you have championship fights, I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be in the main event slot but you should promote that as hard or harder. 

In part two, Meltzer discusses the 2011 schedule of 34 UFC events. Check back tomorrow with MMA Nation for the continued discussion on this topic.