November 3rd’s UFC 230 event at Madison Square Garden in New York City is estimated to have done in the region of 250,000 pay-per-view buys.
That’s the word according to MMAfighting’s Dave Meltzer for an event that was originally supposed to be headlined by a women’s flyweight title encounter between Valentina Shevchenko and Sijara Eubanks.
Meltzer suggests that main event would likely have drawn less than 100,000 buys, but instead the UFC scrapped the idea and went with a short-notice heavyweight title fight between Daniel Cormier and Derrick Lewis instead.
That helped bump up the buy rate, though the fact that it was seen as almost a certainty that ‘DC’ would win likely prevented it from reaching anywhere close to the 375,000 buys that Cormier’s previous fight with then-champion Stipe Miocic did back in January.
Nevertheless, the buy rate is roughly in line with what has come to be expected of UFC pay-per-view events in 2019 outside of the occasional anomoly, such as UFC 229: Khabib Vs McGregor, which of course did astronomical, record-breaking numbers with an estimate 2.4 million people buying the show.
Next up will be UFC 231, which features both a featherweight title fight (Max Holloway vs. Brian Ortega) and women’s flyweight title (Valentina Shevchenko vs. Joanna Jedrzejczyk), but in terms of PPV drawing power UFC 232 later on in December is the more likely to make waves as Jon Jones returns to fight for the vacant 205lb title in a long-awaited rematch with Alexander Gustafsson.
