The UFC will be heading to Connecticut on September 5th. The card will air on FS1. Normally we wouldn’t cover such a banal, uninteresting announcement, but something makes it very special: September 5th also marks the date of Bellator’s season 11 debut, and it’s also being held in Connecticut to boot—a mere 10 miles away.
To say this is a big deal is an understatement. Perhaps Bellator’s rumored 100k PPV buys for Bellator 120 turned the UFC’s head, and now they view the promotion as a threat? And what about ratings? Will Bellator and SpikeTV be able to out-draw the UFC and FOX Sports 1?
(Photo via Getty)
The UFC will be heading to Connecticut on September 5th. The card will air on FS1. Normally we wouldn’t cover such a banal, uninteresting announcement, but something makes it very special: September 5th also marks the date of Bellator’s season 11 debut, and it’s also being held in Connecticut to boot—a mere 10 miles away.
To say this is a big deal is an understatement. Perhaps Bellator’s rumored 100k PPV buys for Bellator 120 turned the UFC’s head, and now they view the promotion as a threat? And what about ratings? Will Bellator and SpikeTV be able to out-draw the UFC and FOX Sports 1?
It’s difficult to answer any of these questions at the current moment, especially since neither the UFC nor Bellator has announced a main event. The only fight announced for Bellator 123 is Brennan Ward vs. James Irvin, which isn’t super-appealing in all honesty.
It seems that the only way Bellator can hope to compete with the UFC is if they—forgive the use of this cliche—stack Bellator 123. They’ll have to put Rampage Jackson on the card, and perhaps even Tito Ortiz as well. But if Bellator puts its top draws on the card for free, it’ll cost quite a bit. The UFC is going head-to-head in order to force Bellator into a pace its roster can’t sustain, it would appear.
These are just musings, of course. We have very little information right now. We’ll be sure to update you when we get more.
Earlier this week, initial estimates pegged Bellator 120: Rampage vs. King Mo as earning 65,000 pay-per-view buys — a number that exceeded the basement-level expectations of most observers. But it turns out that Bellator 120 wasn’t just a moral victory. As first reported by Sherdog (and later confirmed by MMAFighting), Bellator’s inaugural pay-per-view card did over 100,000 buys, making it an unqualified success
Sherdog’s report was based on an anonymous source “speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release buy-rate data.” The source explained that the buyrate information will be readily available in Viacom’s SEC filings later this year.
In a statement released to MMAFighting, Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney played it cool: “I won’t be discussing specific PPV buy rates, but what I can say is that with one of our main events falling out just seven days before our first PPV, a six figure plus buy rate is a good starting point. But, it’s just that, a starting point. My focus is to continue working with our partners at Spike to create the type of big event experience that we created on the 17th.”
Earlier this week, initial estimates pegged Bellator 120: Rampage vs. King Mo as earning 65,000 pay-per-view buys — a number that exceeded the basement-level expectations of most observers. But it turns out that Bellator 120 wasn’t just a moral victory. As first reported by Sherdog (and later confirmed by MMAFighting), Bellator’s inaugural pay-per-view card did over 100,000 buys, making it an unqualified success
Sherdog’s report was based on an anonymous source “speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release buy-rate data.” The source explained that the buyrate information will be readily available in Viacom’s SEC filings later this year.
In a statement released to MMAFighting, Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney played it cool: “I won’t be discussing specific PPV buy rates, but what I can say is that with one of our main events falling out just seven days before our first PPV, a six figure plus buy rate is a good starting point. But, it’s just that, a starting point. My focus is to continue working with our partners at Spike to create the type of big event experience that we created on the 17th.”
So what’s the ceiling for Bellator’s pay-per-view potential? With a stronger card, can they approach the 140k-150k range that the UFC has pulled for its least popular PPV shows? And if so, then what? Will 2014 be the year when Bellator can legitimately call itself a competitor to the UFC?
In a way, that’s a success — despite losing its main event a week out from the show, Bellator 120 cleared the somewhat arbitrary 50k buys figure that was being touted as its break-even mark. It’s not a great number, but it certainly could have been worse. (See: Bodog, Fedor vs. Lindland, 13,000 buys.)
On the other hand, 65,000 buys is still less than half of what the UFC produces on its worst day. The question is, will MMA fans who stayed away from Bellator 120 be swayed into buying future Bellator PPV cards now that we know how bizarrelyentertaining they can get? If you’re not psyched about the promotion’s upcoming Super Hulk Tournament, you’re just not a real fan.
In a way, that’s a success — despite losing its main event a week out from the show, Bellator 120 cleared the somewhat arbitrary 50k buys figure that was being touted as its break-even mark. It’s not a great number, but it certainly could have been worse. (See: Bodog, Fedor vs. Lindland, 13,000 buys.)
On the other hand, 65,000 buys is still less than half of what the UFC produces on its worst day. The question is, will MMA fans who stayed away from Bellator 120 be swayed into buying future Bellator PPV cards now that we know how bizarrelyentertaining they can get? If you’re not psyched about the promotion’s upcoming Super Hulk Tournament, you’re just not a real fan.
Despite the UFC’s legal team being among CagePotato’s most avid readers, we can’t convince them to give us any insights into the UFC’s PPV business. We can only judge a card’s interest by the PPV estimates that circulate a few weeks after an event has passed.
There’s another way to judge fans’ interest in a particular fight card though: Web traffic.
In between discussions about which IFL team was the best (I’m a huge Quad City Silverbacks fan), we at CagePotato headquarters started opining about how Bellator 120: Rampage vs. King Mo would compare to a low-level UFC PPV. Some of us said it’d bury an event like UFC 173: Barao vs. Dillashaw in terms of traffic, some of us said it would get buried.
Now that fight week(end) is over, we can jump into AnalyticsPotato mode and see which fight card wowed the web more. And to be clear, I’m using unique page views as the primary metric to judge interest. And by “coverage” we mean articles before/during/after the card that are about the card. Seems obvious but it’s important to be clear.
Earlier in the week, we reported on the CagePotato twitter that Bellator 120 received about 34% more traffic, but that calculation was made in error. There were a couple of articles in our UFC 173 coverage that I forgot to include in the tally. However, even with these pieces added, Bellator 120 still wins out. Bellator 120’s coverage, on the whole, received 11% more traffic than UFC 173’s.
Despite the UFC’s legal team being among CagePotato’s most avid readers, we can’t convince them to give us any insights into the UFC’s PPV business. We can only judge a card’s interest by the PPV estimates that circulate a few weeks after an event has passed.
There’s another way to judge fans’ interest in a particular fight card though: Web traffic.
In between discussions about which IFL team was the best (I’m a huge Quad City Silverbacks fan), we at CagePotato headquarters started opining about how Bellator 120: Rampage vs. King Mo would compare to a low-level UFC PPV. Some of us said it’d bury an event like UFC 173: Barao vs. Dillashaw in terms of traffic, some of us said it would get buried.
Now that fight week(end) is over, we can jump into AnalyticsPotato mode and see which fight card wowed the web more. And to be clear, I’m using unique page views as the primary metric to judge interest. And by “coverage” we mean articles before/during/after the card that are about the card. Seems obvious but it’s important to be clear.
Earlier in the week, we reported on the CagePotato twitter that Bellator 120 received about 34% more traffic, but that calculation was made in error. There were a couple of articles in our UFC 173 coverage that I forgot to include in the tally. However, even with these pieces added, Bellator 120 still wins out. Bellator 120′s coverage, on the whole, received 11% more traffic than UFC 173′s.
Other random insights:
The time spent on page, an important and overlooked metric, was “virtually identical” for both Bellator 120 and UFC 173. Referral sources, too, were identical, with much of the traffic coming from search (Google) and social (Facebook and a bit from Twitter). This isn’t terribly surprising.
What does all of this mean, then?
At a glance, people are probably saying “The best Bellator has to offer only barely edges out a lower-level UFC card!” And that’s fair to an extent. But it’s worth noting that before the card, most of our UFC 173-related content wasn’t doing too well. There was very little hype around the event. Fans had a “how dare the UFC charge us for this crap” attitude about it. Even the live-blog was sub-par during the event. Once it was updated to reflect the huge upset that was TJ Dillashaw defeating Renan Barao, however, traffic on it exploded. The massive upset could’ve definitely helped UFC 173.
Alas, web traffic means little in terms of PPV buys. It’s highly likely that many people who read our post-fight Bellator coverage wanted to see if the event was a train wreck without having to pay for it. Furthermore, we’re just one website. A sample size of one isn’t much to go on. When asked on Twitter, some sites reported that their Bellator 120 traffic was far below expectations.
So, to get a clearer picture, we ran a Google trends comparison:
Interestingly, the search term “Bellator 120″ peaked the day after the PPV, indicating our theory above about most of the traffic coming from people who didn’t watch the PPV. And UFC 173′s peak was slightly higher than Bellator 120′s.
If anything is to be taken from this, it’s that Bellator is capable of generating at least as much Internet-interest (even if it derives from schadenfreude) from the fans as the UFC. Whether that’ll hold true for their future PPV outings is impossible to tell.
Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney didn’t give out the gate numbers at the post-fight presser, even when asked (which probably means they were bad). And it’s still too early to know how Bellator 120 performed at the box office. So, financially, Bellator’s first PPV can’t definitively be called a success or a failure.
Regarding entertainment value, however, Bellator 120 was a success. There were some pacing issues, yes, but overall the card delivered.
In the first fight, Michael Page did his best Anderson Silva impression, knocking out Ricky Rainey (who’s name was hilariously spelled wrong at the post-fight presser) after taunting him mercilessly. In the next bout, former Bellator heavyweight champ Alexander Volkov scored an upset submission win over Blagoi Ivanov.
Then came Tito Ortiz vs. Alexander Shlemenko. Ortiz was the laughing stock of this card, without a doubt. He was a relic from a bygone era who hadn’t won a fight in three years. His ridiculous pre-fight promos (he promised to make Shlemenko “literally shit himself”) only made him look worse. Shlemenko, on the other hand, was Bellator’s middleweight champ and a stern Russian killer. He’d have no problem with Ortiz despite the considerable size difference, or so the world thought. But Ortiz won the fight. He submitted Shlemenko with an arm-triangle choke in the very first round. Then he gave the worst post-fight interview of all time; he pretended to be Hulk Hogan.
As crazy as Ortiz-Shlemenko was, it wasn’t the emotional high point of the PPV, nor was Michael Chandler vs. Will Brooks. Chandler-Brooks was not a particularly anticipated match. In fact, the entire Bellator PPV was centered around the rubber match between Chandler and Eddie Alvarez. When Alvarez withdrew due to a concussion, many thought it meant death for Bellator 120. Will Brooks was thrown in against Chandler, but it was a squash match—or at least that’s what conventional wisdom held. But Brooks upended fans and pundits, beating Chandler via split decision. He was made of sterner stuff than we all gave him credit for.
Then we had the main event, Rampage Jackson vs. King Mo. The fight itself was banal. Mo dominated Rampage with wrestling while Rampage landed a couple of decent shots throughout the fight. It seemed like a pretty easy decision win for King Mo, but the judges didn’t see it that way; they awarded Rampage with a unanimous decision. What happened after the fight was the real draw though. King Mo and Rampage started jaw-jacking. During the Spike TV portion of the broadcast, King Mo accused Bjorn Rebney of “dick riding” Rampage. He didn’t hold in such feelings in his post-fight speech, nor did he silence himself at the post-fight presser. Him and Rampage yelled at each other while the presser stream intermittently died possibly due to the sheer volume of viewers.
So what’s the fallout?
(Because Getty had no images from last night. / Photo via Getty)
Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney didn’t give out the gate numbers at the post-fight presser, even when asked (which probably means they were bad). And it’s still too early to know how Bellator 120 performed at the box office. So, financially, Bellator’s first PPV can’t definitively be called a success or a failure.
Regarding entertainment value, however, Bellator 120 was a success. There were some pacing issues, yes, but overall the card delivered.
In the first fight, Michael Page did his best Anderson Silva impression, knocking out Ricky Rainey (who’s name was hilariously spelled wrong at the post-fight presser) after taunting him mercilessly. In the next bout, former Bellator heavyweight champ Alexander Volkov scored an upset submission win over Blagoi Ivanov.
Then came Tito Ortiz vs. Alexander Shlemenko. Ortiz was the laughing stock of this card, without a doubt. He was a relic from a bygone era who hadn’t won a fight in three years. His ridiculous pre-fight promos (he promised to make Shlemenko “literally shit himself”) only made him look worse. Shlemenko, on the other hand, was Bellator’s middleweight champ and a stern Russian killer. He’d have no problem with Ortiz despite the considerable size difference, or so the world thought. But Ortiz won the fight. He submitted Shlemenko with an arm-triangle choke in the very first round. Then he gave the worst post-fight interview of all time; he pretended to be Hulk Hogan.
As crazy as Ortiz-Shlemenko was, it wasn’t the emotional high point of the PPV, nor was Michael Chandler vs. Will Brooks. Chandler-Brooks was not a particularly anticipated match. In fact, the entire Bellator PPV was centered around the rubber match between Chandler and Eddie Alvarez. When Alvarez withdrew due to a concussion, many thought it meant death for Bellator 120. Will Brooks was thrown in against Chandler, but it was a squash match—or at least that’s what conventional wisdom held. But Brooks upended fans and pundits, beating Chandler via split decision. He was made of sterner stuff than we all gave him credit for.
Then we had the main event, Rampage Jackson vs. King Mo. The fight itself was banal. Mo dominated Rampage with wrestling while Rampage landed a couple of decent shots throughout the fight. It seemed like a pretty easy decision win for King Mo, but the judges didn’t see it that way; they awarded Rampage with a unanimous decision. What happened after the fight was the real draw though. King Mo and Rampage started jaw-jacking. During the Spike TV portion of the broadcast, King Mo accused Bjorn Rebney of “dick riding” Rampage. He didn’t hold in such feelings in his post-fight speech, nor did he silence himself at the post-fight presser. Him and Rampage yelled at each other while the presser stream intermittently died possibly due to the sheer volume of viewers.
So what’s the fallout?
It’s tough to parse this one out, Potato Nation.
Michael Page looked great, which is obviously a good thing for Bellator. And there’s not much to say about Ivanov vs. Volkov. It was a good fight. Volkov will get a title shot at Vitaly Minakov, and Ivanov will likely get placed into another heavyweight tournament sometime soon.
Ortiz-Shlemenko is tough to pass judgement on. Bellator obviously has more invested in Ortiz, so him winning his first fight under their banner is a positive thing. Now he can be featured in other fight cards. How much Ortiz’s presence will increase viewership remains to be seen. Still, it’s better than him losing, which would’ve damaged whatever remaining value his name had beyond repair. However, no good can come from your middleweight champion losing to an ancient UFC washout and has been—and looking like a total scrub while doing it.
At first, it seemed like Will Brooks defeating Michael Chandler destroyed the Bellator lightweight division. But apparently Eddie Alvarez can demand to fight Chandler anyway, meaning Brooks’ victory didn’t wreck the much-anticipated rubber match between Alvarez and Chandler. Brooks beating Chandler helps get him over as a legitimate talent. Brooks winning, while maybe not optimal, isn’t the disaster people made it out to be.
Last night’s crown jewel was Rampage vs. King Mo, and not because of what happened in the cage. It was all about the post-fight hysterics. The questionable decision and (now seemingly legitimate) beef between the two makes a rematch enticing from a promotional standpoint, something that couldn’t have been said if either man decisively finished the other.
The PPV could’ve gone much worse. Could it have been better? Maybe. There have been worse UFC PPVs that we paid more money for. Bellator 120 didn’t go bad enough to destroy Bellator, but it certainly didn’t go good enough to bring the Viacom-owned promotion to new heights of excellence. If nothing else, Bellator 120 was a perfect example of the inherent insanity that makes MMA special.
“Bjorn, you know what’s up, man — your dick-ridin’ ass. You know who won the fuckin’ fight, you smilin’ and shit. You know I won that fight. Nah, nah. Rampage, nothin’ against you, but I beat you…I won that fight. And [unintelligible] dick-ridin’ ass, ay…”
Mo was convinced that Bellator was favoring Jackson in this matchup, and was clearly cranky before the fight even started. When all three judges returned scores of 29-28 for Rampage — horseshit, by the way — Mo grabbed the mic and let ‘er rip. Unprofessional? Sure. The perfect end to an insane, absurd, entertaining night? Absolutely.
“Bjorn, you know what’s up, man — your dick-ridin’ ass. You know who won the fuckin’ fight, you smilin’ and shit. You know I won that fight. Nah, nah. Rampage, nothin’ against you, but I beat you…I won that fight. And [unintelligible] dick-ridin’ ass, ay…”
Mo was convinced that Bellator was favoring Jackson in this matchup, and was clearly cranky before the fight even started. When all three judges returned scores of 29-28 for Rampage — horseshit, by the way — Mo grabbed the mic and let ‘er rip. Unprofessional? Sure. The perfect end to an insane, absurd, entertaining night? Absolutely.
