Underwhelmed by the UFC’s White House event ratings? Don’t worry, UFC CEO Dana White has a bigger number coming soon.
Leading up to the UFC Freedom 250 card at the White House, White predicted that the show would do Super Bowl numbers — over a hundred million viewers. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio predicted a billion viewers. And following the event, Joe Rogan claimed the event had generated over 150 million views by Monday and was still climbing.
The official numbers as announced by Paramount+? A bit less impressive in comparison but still great for the streaming service. An average of 7 million viewers in the U.S. watched the event, with 17 million tuning in for at least a minute. Considering Paramount+ has 79 million subscribers, that’s really good! And the numbers will only get better after UFC counts up all the international viewing.
“A third of [Paramount+] subscribers tuned in to the [event],” White said of the ratings number. “It was huge, and the global number’s massive. So, that’s gonna come out next week. That’s the biggest thing that we’ve ever done and, obviously, the biggest thing ever for the sport.”
“My job — I’ve been saying this since the the end of the ESPN deal — my job is to deliver for Paramount,” White continued. “And boy, have we delivered in six months. I mean, a lot of the stuff, we’ve just been quiet. We let them announce, and then some of these markets are still in our pay-per-view. So you gotta go through all the pay-per-view stuff and everything else. But the global number will probably come out next week.”
There’s all sorts of numbers that the UFC and Paramount+ could release to impress everybody. We’re sure a ton of people didn’t stay up until 1 a.m. on Sunday night to watch the main event. How many views did the Alex Pereira vs. Ciryl Gane and Justin Gaethje vs. Ilia Topuria fights do on the service over the past week? Probably a lot. Dana White loves sharing insane social media impressions for Power Slap. We’re sure the social media impressions for UFC White House were legitimately nuts. So where are these numbers?
White says a lot of the data won’t be shared because of the public structure of the companies involved.
“There’s two problems,” he said. “We’re a public company, and Paramount is a public company. There’s so many massive wins from that night, but I can’t talk about any of them because they influence stock movement. So there’s so much stuff we get, I’m telling you, just watch what happens.”
“You guys know how much I love to win and gloat, and I can’t do that anymore. There’s so much s–t I would love to drop on you right now, but you’ll see it playing out over the next year, earnings calls and f–king all that s–t. So this will all play out, and I just have to keep doing what I’m doing and stay quiet. Stay quiet. Just grind.”
