In our sport, people have long huddled around a UFC PPV as if it were a religious rite. When social media was gaining steam in the early-2010s, UFC PPVs were ladled out on Twitter (now X), 140 characters at a time from those on the ground level, as if they were transmissions from the war. Any MMA fan who didn\u2019t spring for the then-$59.99 price tag suffered instant FOMO.<\/p>\n
Why?<\/p>\n
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Because getting the PPV meant attending the party. A sacrifice, it\u2019s true, but also a shared experience. The price of admission kept unserious fans out. What lurked behind the paywall was the sport\u2019s everything, and the feeling of camaraderie for any of us who willingly paid the door fees was priceless.<\/p>\n
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Brock Lesnar headlined UFC 100 in 2009, setting a then-record for UFC pay-per-view sales. (Photo by Jon Kopaloff\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
(Jon P. Kopaloff via Getty Images)<\/p>\n
A typical Monday conversation might go something like this:<\/p>\n
\u201cDid you get Saturday\u2019s pay-per-view?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDamn right I did. That GSP is a freaking monster.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t believe Dan Hardy didn\u2019t tap.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDude is Gumby!\u201d<\/p>\n
A UFC PPV stood for \u201ccan\u2019t-miss event\u201d for what was essentially a continuing saga \u2014 a long-running, fighting soap opera that early aficionados deemed sacred.<\/p>\n
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Of course, it wasn\u2019t nearly as hipster as it sounds. If nothing else, the UFC has always been anti-hipster. It gladly poured Monster Energy drink over men in capris. It was more like a monthly concentration of our greatest focus, to see firsthand the best the sport could offer, which gave MMA its sense of community. It was a choice that could be regretted in the end \u2014 anybody who sprung for UFC 149 from Calgary never fully recovered from that groin kick \u2014 yet it was a choice we made because we didn\u2019t care for the alternative.<\/p>\n
All of this largely held true into the 2020s, even though pirating and illegal streams have long done away with the sacrifice. A few years ago, Dana proclaimed he was going to go after pirates himself, and it was fun to imagine him in a suburban tree with his binoculars searching through windows for glitchy Russian streams.<\/p>\n
But the writing has been on the wall for a long time that PPVs could be on the way out. The WWE, which is run by the same TKO ownership group as the UFC, came to that conclusion a couple of years back.<\/p>\n
The UFC has been tied to a dying animal, and it will be for five more PPVs in 2025.<\/p>\n
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Still, you worry about the sport of MMA losing some of the vital distinction that made it. UFC Fight Night events, especially those held at the UFC Apex in Las Vegas, have become skippable affairs. PPVs have always meant title fights, which the UFC has done a masterful job over the years of holding to high standards. To see belts change hands, you paid for it. Even if that feels a little heisty in 2025, it served to force a value in its structure and interest, to keep a premium on things.<\/p>\n
To give title fights away, even at a subscription fee? Perhaps the value scale loses some of its natural escalation. The greatest fear is that things blend together, and the sport plays out on a gray plateau. Will the UFC even be as interested in developing stars without PPVs to sell them on?<\/p>\n
The savings on the pocketbook can\u2019t help but be a welcome thing for fans, ultimately. And who knows exactly how things are going to play out? Lester Bangs declared rock & roll dead in the 1970s, and some 50 years later there\u2019s still a pulse. Right after TKO COO and president Mark Shapiro said the \u201cPPV model was dead,\u201d White wasn\u2019t so quick to pull the plug.<\/p>\n
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\u201cA fight will pop up that I never saw coming,\u201d White told the New York Post. \u201cA star will pop up out of somewhere. Anything is possible. And you could do a one-off pay-per-view. I am going to be on pay-per-view this Saturday. Pay-per-view is not dead.\u201d<\/p>\n
But it\u2019ll be dead in the sense we knew it. And what that means is a paradigm shift in the sport. Fighters will no longer be linked to PPV points, which has always been a story within the story. Diehard fans who\u2019ve willingly paid for (or at least went through the trouble of illegally streaming) PPVs will now share the sport with the homogenized sports world at large.<\/p>\n
Which I guess is the root of things. Homogeny is the scariest thing in combat sports. We didn\u2019t miss Dude Wipes until we saw the Reebok fight kits. Then we understood some soul was being sucked out of our rogue sport. The closer to the mainstream the sport drifts, the more it loses some of its lifeblood.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to be nostalgic about being gouged, it\u2019s true, but you can\u2019t help but be protective of what got us here. Or to remember that at one time there was some good bang for the buck.<\/p>\n
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Back in the mid-aughts, the UFC combined the tuxedo affairs of 1990s boxing with the vibes of an underground temptation. From there it slowly stockpiled its greatest passions behind the paywall. Remember how red Dana\u2019s face would turn as he tried to sell the PPV at the end of the televised portion of the card? Remember the names?<\/p>\n
B.J. Penn. Matt Hughes. Chuck Liddell. Tito Ortiz. Randy Couture. Georges St-Pierre. Quinton Jackson. Jon Jones. Brock Lesnar. Cain Velasquez. Conor McGregor. Ronda Rousey. Go through the posters of the past, and they were the special attractions, the names on the marquee for the numbered events. Those were some good parties we shelled out for. As MMA fans, they were ours.<\/p>\n
And if that passion is lost, those PPVs will seem like bargains next to the ultimate cost of business.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back in 2009, Dana White swore that if UFC 100 did a million pay-per-view buys he\u2019d bungee jump…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63047,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,958,786,11877,785,588,85,22311,787,50615],"class_list":{"0":"post-63046","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mma","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-dana-white","11":"tag-fighting","12":"tag-jon-jones","13":"tag-mma","14":"tag-sport","15":"tag-sports","16":"tag-the-ufc","17":"tag-ufc","18":"tag-ufc-ppv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63046\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}