UFC 213 was a pay-per-view marred by multiple fight cancellations, including the literal main event on fight day, and the end result was an absolutely awful buyrate. MMA Fighting’s Dave Meltzer has the details:
UFC 213 on July 8, the show that lost its main event of Amanda Nunes vs. Valentina Shevchenko at the last minute, is currently projected to do in the range of 125,000 to 150,000 buys. With the headliner of Robert Whittaker vs. Yoel Romero for the interim middleweight title, that could wind up as the lowest UFC number for a pay-per-view event, with the exception of some shows headlined by Demetrious Johnson, over the last decade. That correlates with the prelims rating on FS 1 being the lowest in nearly three years.
That was a show where everything went wrong, as the hoped for main event between Michael Bisping vs. Georges St-Pierre, which would have been expected to do major numbers, fell apart before it could be signed, apparently due to St-Pierre suffering an eye injury. Then Cody Garbrandt vs. T.J. Dillashaw fell through due to Garbrandt’s back injury, and Donald Cerrone vs. Robbie Lawler fell through due to Cerrone having an infection.
When you consider those numbers and the lackluster ratings for the TUF 25 Finale, International Fight Week 2017 was a bust. From the BE side of things, UFC 213 was doing absolutely no site traffic right up until Nunes vs. Shevchenko was cancelled. It may as well have been a Fight Pass event. Had the fight had remained on board, it presumably would’ve helped the buyrate to some extent, but probably not anything to suggest a dramatic increase.
The big pay-per-view for the UFC is just nine days away, with Daniel Cormier and Jon Jones headlining a tripleheader of title fights at UFC 214 in Anaheim, California. Their first encounter did 800,000 buys, and 214 looks like an event that should exceed that number. If it doesn’t? Well that’d be more than disappointing.
On the Bellator MMA side, their second PPV in promotional history appears to have not done much better than the first one back in 2014. In fact, there’s a chance it actually didn’t even outperform Bellator 120: King Mo vs. Rampage. Meltzer reported that the June 24th event, dubbed “Bellator: NYC” did somewhere between 90,000 to 130,000 buys, which is well below Scott Coker’s lofty aspirations of having a “respectable” number in the mid-200,000s range. On the plus side for Bellator, the card did give them their best ever gate, exceeding $1.5 million at Madison Square Garden.
The question for Bellator MMA is whether or not that was as good as it can get for them in the PPV market. Can they produce something that would do more buys than Chael Sonnen vs. Wanderlei Silva, Fedor Emelianenko vs. Matt Mitrione, as well as two title fights and the heavily hyped debut of Aaron Pico? Viacom plans to have more Bellator pay-per-views down the line, and the options to outperform 130,000 don’t seem plentiful.
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