2009 Marks Breakout Year for UFC PPV Sales
by Correspondent Written on January 02, 2010 
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This past year has been a wild ride for all of MMA! So much has happened.
Affliction collapsed, Fedor once again didn't sign with the UFC. He went to Strikeforce, and now Strikeforce is looking like a lot bigger player in the world MMA scene.
The Light Heavyweight title changed hands once again.
Lyoto Machida resurrected interest in karate with dominant wins, only to be handed a highly controversial win over Shogun.
Brock Lesnar and Georges St. Pierre impressed the hell out of us at UFC 100.
Brock Lesnar and about a hundred other guys got sick or injured at the end of the year.
In 2008, the UFC was the top selling Pay Per View sport. The traditional king of combat sports pay per view, boxing, turned in a very respectable year too and was at least able to claim victory by having the largest number of buys for a single PPV in 2008.
2009 changed that.
Once again, boxing had a great year with not only one, but two events that sold more than one million buys. This was actually a great year for boxing, and they should be commended for putting on two excellent matchups!
But for the first time ever, the UFC absolutely buried them and every other PPV event in every category. We're not talking about the UFC destroying boxing. There is no indication that boxing is diminishing at all.
What we're seeing is that the UFC is becoming something bigger than boxing ever was!
Take a look at the numbers!
Pay Per View sales the UFC has netted this year:
1.) UFC 93 - 320,000 buys
2.) UFC 94 - 800,000 buys*
3.) UFC 96 - 350,000 buys
4.) UFC 97 - 625,000 buys*
5.) UFC 98 - 635,000 buys*
6.) UFC 99 - 360,000 buys
7.) UFC 100 - 1,500,000+ buys**
8.) UFC 101 - 1,050,000 buys*
9.) UFC 102 - 435,000 buys
10.) UFC 103 - 400,000 buys
11.) UFC 104 - 500,000 buys*
12.) UFC 106 - 375,000 buys
13.) UFC 107 - 620,000 buys*
* One Title Fight on the card.
** Two Title Fights on the card.
Total = approximately 7,970,000 PPV buys for UFC events in 2009.
The top five Pay Per Fighting events of 2009 are as follows:
1.) UFC 100 Lesnar vs Mir / St Pierre vs Alves - 1,500,000+ buys
2.) Pacquiao vs Cotto - 1,250,000 buys
3.) UFC 101 - Penn vs Florian / A. Silva vs Griffin - 1,100,000 buys
4.) Mayweather vs. Marquez - 1,000,000+ buys
5.) UFC 94 - Penn vs St Pierre 2 - 800,000 buys
The UFC broke the one million buy mark and they did it twice in the same year.
Every PPV card they put on that had at least one title fight in it did better than 500,000 buys.
Every PPV card they put on that had two champions in it did better than 800,000 buys. UFC 94 (Penn vs. St. Pierre 2) featured a matchup between two champions.
UFC 101 featured Penn defending his title against Kenny Florian and Anderson Silva moving up to Light Heavyweight for a non-title fight.
The biggest card of the year was also the biggest card in MMA history. Purported to have sold over 1.7 million buys, it sold 1.5 million minimum. It also beat out boxing. UFC 100 was the biggest pay per view of 2009 without question.
The year of 2009 was the most lucrative in pay per view revenue in the promotion's history.
The only record still standing is a very high mark indeed. Oscar de la Hoya vs Floyd Mayweather sold 2.15 million pay per view buys in 2007.
That's just two years ago, which should demonstrate how foolish it is to claim that boxing is a dying sport. But that's a record that both sports can continue to shoot for.
When we total everything, the UFC posted just a hair under 8 million buys this year. At the going rate of $49, their income for the year from pay per views alone would have been about $390,530,000. That's a whole lot of Benjamins, folks!
That's not even counting income from video game royalties, UFC merchandise, DVD sales, sponsors and so on.
Here is where the UFC is looking pretty despicable. We can conservatively guesstimate that $450 million in income for the UFC. How much of that went to the fighters? Not nearly enough!
The highest payday for the year was a tie: Brock Lesnar and Georges St. Pierre both made $400,000 for their fights at UFC 100.
Those two paydays were much bigger than the vast majority of paydays for other fighters. And that's a ridiculously low estimate of the UFC’s yearly earnings, people!
While I commend Dana White and the Fertitta brothers for finding such a lucrative business, I think they'd be doing themselves and the sport a huge favor by sharing the wealth with the men who bleed for them.
The trouble with MMA today is that athletes stand to make a lot more money by doing something else. If they can make it in the NFL, they'll do that and make way more money.
If they can make it in the NBA or MLB or NHL, they'll make a ton more money doing that. What would the sport look like in 20 years if you could make about the same amount of money in MMA that you make in the NFL?
And competing promotions are able to thrive largely because the UFC doesn't offer enough money to entice all of the best in the world.
Make no mistake, the UFC has far more of the best fighters in the world than any other promotion. If they want to pick up the rest of them, there's an easy way to do it. Show them the money.
I think this is the best sport in the world. I would love to see the best athletes in the world compete.
As it stands, there's plenty of men and women who compete anyways for one simple reason: This is the sport that tells you who the baddest man and baddest woman on the planet is. This is where you really find out if my daddy can beat up your daddy, etc.
This is combat and competition at its purest. It is the very embodiment of competition; the purest contest between two athletes.
