It looks like CM Punk’s “one-and-one” appearance inside the Octagon was a pretty big event with the casual MMA fans.
According to Dave Meltzer at MMAFighting.com, CM Punk’s Octagon debut against Mickey Gall helped drive a lot of casual buys to the UFC 203 pay-per-view event earlier this month.
Early estimates have the UFC 203 PPV, which featured Stipe Miocic vs. Alistair Overeem for the UFC Heavyweight Championship as the actual main event, drawing between 425,000-475,000 buys.
While not an enormous success, the show was ordered more than average UFC pay-per-view events. Meltzer noted in his report that Punk’s fight was likely responsible for an additional 125,000-225,000 buys.
To put the 425,000-475,000 buys figure into perspective, the UFC 198 event in Brazil, which was an incredibly stacked show for die-hard MMA fans, and also featured a UFC Heavyweight Title fight as the main event (Fabricio Werdum vs. Stipe Miocic), reportedly drew less than 300,000 buys on pay-per-view.
Headlined by Stipe Miocic vs. Alistair Overeem and featuring Fabricio Werdum vs. Travis “Hapa” Browne 2 and CM Punk vs. Mickey Gall, UFC 203 took place on Saturday, September 10, 2016 from the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio.