As promised the UFC has now delivered the global viewership numbers for the UFC Freedom 250 event at the White House earlier this month.

We already knew that the event headlined by Ilia Topuria vs. Justin Gaethje had been watched by a total of 17 million viewers in the U.S. and Latin America on Paramount+, but after waiting to receive the ratings from other countries around the world that number has now doubled, with the overall global viewership announced as 34 million.

The UFC’s statement notes that this new figure takes into account countries like Australia, China, India, South Korea, New Zealand, and the U.K.

However, it’s not actually a final tally yet as they are still waiting on the ratings from several countries like Spain and France, which were key markets given that headliner Ilia Topuria claims Spanish nationality, while co-main event winner Ciryl Gane is French.

It’s not normal for the UFC to announce global ratings like this, but it seems to have been an opportunity to one-up the MVP: Rousey vs. Carano event on Netflix a month before the White House event.

It had been anticipated that the MVP event, co-owned by Jake Paul, would best the UFC’s ratings due to Netflix having 325 million subscribers, compared to Paramount+ having 79.6 million.

And that had proved to be the case initially, at least domestically, with the Carano vs. Rousey event averaging 9.3 million viewers in the U.S. and UFC Freedom 250 doing 7 million between the U.S. and Latin America, while both events at the time reported 17 million total viewers.

Those numbers were enough for MVP’s Jake Paul to declare victory in the battle of the promotions, stating last week that, “As a boxing promoter it feels good waking up today being the biggest MMA promoter.”

Ronda Rousey also stuck the boot in to the UFC’s Chief Business Officer by writing, “Lmao! Kiss my a** Hunter Campbell.”

However, as today’s numbers show, the UFC has now had the last laugh as those ratings hadn’t actually told the fully story.

While MVP’s show was only available on Netflix around the world, UFC’s multiple broadcasting partners beyond just Paramount+ in various markets ensured that in the end their event was actually watched by twice as many people as MVP’s.

So the overall number is impressive for the UFC, though it has to be noted that this wasn’t the “Super Bowl type numbers” that Dana White had been predicting pre-event, given that the last Super Bowl drew a global audience of 126 million.

Going back to the MMA comparison though, while MVP had boasted of 410 million impressions across their social media channels, along with a further 1 billion on Netflix’s channels, the UFC has now revealed they drew a staggering 126 billion total views and 5 billion engagements – a new record for the company.