Dana White’s estimates for how well UFC 229 will do on pay-per-view continue to increase as the latest data suggests the blockbuster lightweight title fight between Conor McGregor and Khabib Nurmagomedov is on course to almost double the previous high watermark for the promotion.
“I told you guys we were trending at close to 2 million pay-per-view buys,” White told ESPN. “We’re closer to 3 million now. We’re trending close to 3 million pay-per-view buys for this fight.”
If so that would completely obliterate the 1.65 million PPV buys that UFC 202: McGregor Vs Diaz II did back in August of 2016.
“This thing’s breaking every record we’ve ever had as far as numbers go,” White said. “If you look at Mayweather-McGregor, the first episode of Embedded in 24 hours did 800,000 views. This one’s at 1.7 million in 24 hours….I could just go on for days with numbers and how it’s scaling. It’s gonna be big.”
It’s not just the PPV sales that are set to be astronomical, White says that tickets to see the show like are also in exceptionally high demand.
“This is the biggest fight we’ve ever done. We don’t ever sell the Zuffa section, the section behind me. No fighters got tickets to this fight. Daniel Cormier will be there. He bought three tickets. I bought tickets. [UFC owner] Ari Emanuel bought tickets. Everybody paid for their tickets. This is the first time ever we split the media section in half. We sold half of that section and the other half is media. Never done that before either.”
