To this day the 2016, UFC 200 pre-fight press conference only has 852k views on UFC’s youtube channel. That is with Brock and Jones at the presser among others like DC and Cain.
Obviously both the promotion and the platform have grown a lot since 2016 but the UFC 196 Conor vs Nate presser has 2.M views.
Conor’s recent Dustin and Cowboy fight press conferences have between 2-6M views. The Khabib presser has 8.7M views. That has to be a record for the promotion.
To put how big the 8.7M number is in perspective, look at what UFC 200 did. For comparison, Makhachev vs Oliveira did 1.3M, Khabib vs Gaethje did 2.8M, Adesanya vs Pereira 1 only did 1M, last weekend’s Edwards card only did 1.3M and Jones return vs Gane only did 771k thousand.
That Nunes Aldana pre fight presser did a laughable 341k views. WMMA really needs its own WUFC so they stop hurting the brand of regular “UFC”.
UFC’s channel does not have Ronda’s pre-fight press conferences up so no clue on those.
Alright so I did a little digging. I looked up a ton of big UFC PPV’s over the last 10 years or so and this is what I came up with. I obviously didn’t look up every single event so this is all rough estimates, but bare with me.
-The oldest pre-fight press conference I can find that was officially posted by the UFC channel was UFC 135, for Jones vs. Rampage. This event took place in November of 2011. There are press conference videos and clips posted by other channels and members of the media, but not the UFC.
-From what I can see, from November 2011 to early 2019 ish, the UFC only officially posted pre-fight press conferences for PPV’s that included Anderson, GSP, Rousey, and McGregor. They also posted some “seasonal” pressers during this time period, but not official pre-fight pressers.
-Around early 2021, ESPN started posting their own official UFC pressers as well. Some of these do really good numbers along with the UFC channel.
-Around early to mid 2021 is when the UFC started posting pre-fight pressers for every PPV
Well that is pretty interesting. I only thought to look because I was reading some post about 200 and decided to look at how many views the presser had on the UFC channel. I was just surprised it was so low.
It will be interesting to see what they can put together for 300 and what the presser will do compared to 200.
I’m thinking a 300 presser even without Conor/Khabib/Nate etc… should still be able to do 2M plus views if they stack the card.
Yeah for sure, at least 2M+. Not to mention the YouTube audience is much bigger than it ever was back then and the UFC knows this considering they have so much on there now. DWCS, Embedded, free fights, etc… it is a huge funnel for them.
Absolutely. I heard Nickal say on a JRE clip that his pro debut was on Fight Pass and did like 3 or 4M views and that was before he was on DWCS which itself gets huge exposure on youtube.
Thats where the APEX comes in, UFC can pump out these DWCS fights and Fight Nights from the APEX and get some of these young fighters crazy exposure via Fight Pass and youtube and then when its time to get them on a card in from of an audience for a big Fight Night in a key market or a PPV card and they are breaking gate records for the arena or getting huge fees just to bring the show to town.
Years before DWCS came out I thought a series like that was the next logical step for them. TUF was not broad enough and too limited in terms of two weight classes a year. They got it right with CS and its like they got their own minor league running and they are doing it right out of the same spot they can crank out a Fight Night whenever they want.
Its wild because at the time of conor vs khabib I didnt really care but was gonna watch either way. I thought khabib was boring etc but apparently the world disagrees with this beautiful man.
Look how it was with O’Malley. He was a 7-0 fighter nobody had heard of and never got signed by Bellator or PFL and then he blows up on CS via youtube and then he is co-main event all of a sudden on a TUF Finale and then his next fight was on a PPV and its been PPV fights ever since, all the way to the title.
It all started with Fight Pass and youtube exposure that happened almost overnight. Big networks and new physical markets not required.
When one of my favorite fighters is fighting, I watch everything I can during fight week
When Nick Diaz returned against Lawler at 266, that was the first time I watched a press conference Live as it was happening in so many years. I watched the countdown the embeded or whatever it’s called. It was a fun week and a trip down memory lane since when I was in High School I use to watch all those for every single PPV no matter who was fighting
