Dana White responds to critics who believe Power Slap has taken his attention away from properly promoting UFC fights.
UFC Las Vegas went down last night (Sat., March 11, 2023) and fight fans might have noticed it looked a little different from most UFC-staged events in “Sin City.” That’s because it went down at The Theater at Virgin Hotels rather than UFC APEX.
Why? APEX was being used to host the Power Slap season 1 Finale event (watch highlights here),
Power Slap hasn’t been a hit ratings-wise for TBS, but the numbers online aren’t too bad. The Finale, which aired on YouTube alternative Rumble, reportedly had 2.1 million views. And according to UFC President, Dana White — who co-owns Power Slap with his old Zuffa cronies — the other social media numbers are great!
“Think about this: this thing is eight weeks old. This didn’t exist 8 weeks ago. Didn’t exist!” White said at the Power Slap post-event press conference. “The social media channels for it didn’t exist, none of this existed. We’re over a billion views on TikTok alone. On Instagram we did like 38.5 million views a week. And online on Rumble, the whole season did 15 million views globally.
“These are obviously massive numbers, and it proves that this thing — like the UFC — is global,” White continued. “The social and streaming numbers are just f—ing nuts. The worst Power Slap post of the day did better than the best UFC post on UFC’s social. Yeah, this things a f—ing monster, man.”
It does help that Power Slap is mainly promoted via UFC’s social media channels, which have existed for longer than eight weeks. Over at the official Power Slap Twitter account, the Heavyweight championship-crowning slap moment from Saturday’s event generated 1,009 likes off 375,000 views, so … we can say the thing definitely gets some reach.
Indeed, people are seeing it in their feeds.
Many of those people are UFC fans who are getting a little tired of Power Slap being sandwiched into all their mixed martial arts (MMA) promo. Some also feel like White is promoting Power Slap to the detriment of other UFC events. Sitting in front of a Power Slap banner at the Power Slap / UFC Las Vegas post-fight press conference (watch it here), White dismissed the idea that he was spending too much time on his new venture.
“Do I even really need to answer that question?” he said. “I mean, come on. Anybody that wants to talk s— can come up with anything. I say this all the time: people have no idea what I really do and don’t do, and they don’t know anything about this business. Nobody. Nobody knows anything about this business. If they did, they’d be doing what we do.
“The UFC, we’re coming off one of the biggest weekends in the company’s history,” White continued. “[UFC 285 was] the number one social fight of all time, it beat Conor vs. Khabib. The gate, the this, the that, it was like the fourth largest event we’ve ever done. Tonight was a sell out over at … at, you know, the Virgin. What else would you people like me to do? If we weren’t selling tickets, weren’t putting on fights people wanted to see, sponsorship is though the f—ing roof, and the list goes on and on, maybe you’d have something.
“Shut the f— up and mind you business,” White concluded. “That’s what I have to say about it, now that I think about it. That’s what I’ll say.”
For complete UFC Las Vegas: “Yan vs. Dvalishvili” results and play-by-play, click HERE.