MMASports

No, UFC 229 won’t do 3 milllion buys

Google Trends graph on interest in UFC PPV's featuring Conor, as well as the man himself.

If you were to listen to Dana White, you’d believe that Nate Diaz doesn’t move the needle, that the UFC will forever be owned by Zuffa, and that Jeff Blatnick had little to do with the unified rules.

That’s why I can’t blame people for believing yet another one of his patented lies, that the UFC 229 PPV is going to do 3 million buys. There is absolutely no evidence to indicate that this is true, and plenty to think that this won’t do more than one million PPV buys. How do I know?

The Mayweather Fight and Bus Incident put Conor’s name out there…and ruined it

When Conor barely landed a clean punch, insecure MMA fans everywhere congratulated him on ‘putting in a good effort’, ‘doing a great job of fighting on behalf of MMA against the greatest boxer of all time’, etc. Look at how much interest he garnered! A lot of people watched, but they saw him look awful and that ruined his image as a true fighter in the eyes of the mainstream. I’m not saying that’s true, but perception is everything in the fight game.

What they saw was that he didn’t land one clean punch against an over-the-hill boxer who was so happy about the easy money he was going to make that he literally laughed during the initial staredown.

The only great accomplishment Conor performed in that fight was convincing people that he had a chance and that they should spend their money. A great performance for a grifter, sure, but not a boxer. All non-MMA fans saw his performance and thought it was terrible, that he didn’t know what he was doing and that he didn’t belong.

The bus incident got a lot of attention, but for the wrong reasons. There has been no sustained interest in Conor after the fact, and casuals are not talking about the bus incident leading up to this PPV. Why? Because most normal people understand he crossed a line and don’t want to support such unsavoury promotional tactics. Or you can just defer to Felice Herrig outright calling him a ‘piece of shit’ to know how normal people look at that situation.

The MMA World has a hard time critically analyzing itself

And that brings me to the most important point of all, and why so few people are able to see this situation for what it really is. The MMA world is so insecure and Conor has taken advantage of that for years. Being so insular and defensive, rather than do some basic analysis of Dana White’s prediction, they are quick to parrot it without a second thought. MMA fans have always wanted to believe the best about their sport and try to avoid tough questions for the sake of growing it in the mainstream, a mentality that stretches back to the dark days pre-TUF when it looked like the UFC wouldn’t survive.

But that outlook is actually detrimental to the growth of the sport at this point. Besides, it should always be the wrong mentality to have if you want to be realistic and think critically. It’s downright embarrassing if you’re a journalist.

The best metric we have

So you’re an MMA fan who refuses to see the truth about the boxing and bus debacles, respectively. Well you can’t argue with Google, the most accurate data analysis company in the world.

stats, UFC 229 has little interest compared with other Conor PPV's, and his own peaks as a persona in the past. Trends
UFC 229 has little interest compared with other Conor PPV’s, and his own peaks as a persona in the past.

Taken from Google Trends, this image shows interest in Conor’s PPV’s as a search term over the past five years. That large blip post-Mayweather fight is the bus incident and the lack of interest afterwards leads me to believe that hurt Conor’s drawing power, not helped. If that interest was sustained it would have shown up in the search terms for either Conor or this PPV. As you can see from the graph, interest in both this PPV and Conor McGregor is surprisingly low. Google Trends are normally a solid indicator of interest in a fight card, and it usually does a good job of translating those metrics into PPV buys.

So no, this won’t do 3 million buys. Stop drinking the MMA kool-aid, and start thinking for yourself. The sport will be better off in the long run.

The only real MMA journalist with the scoop you should listen to is right here: