UFC 129 was the biggest UFC event in history in terms of attendance, live gate ticket sales and marketing. The fight card featured welterweight champion and MMA superstar Georges St-Pierre, Jake Shields, Randy Couture, Lyoto Machida and Jose Aldo.
It was a truly epic event that should have done huge numbers in the pay per view ratings as well. The strange thing is that it did not meet the expectations that were placed on it by the projections.
Dave Meltzer reported that the event was estimated to have done around 800-900,000 buys, which is short of the one million buy goal.
The numbers will likely have been skewed due to the fact the UFC now starts its pay per views at 9pm Eastern time as opposed to 10pm in the past.
The time change certainly had an effect on the number of people who bought the event. After a few months, the numbers will be more clearly defined, but until casual fans get used to the time change, the numbers will most likely stay a bit lower.
Even with the numbers being below expectations, UFC 129 did a great job of bringing the sport of MMA into the mainstream. The event used so many different media outlets that had not been previously utilized and it helped the sport crawl forward to dominance.
The link to the source article is below.
http://mmapayout.com/2011/05/ufc-129-payout-perspective-part-2/
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