Amid suggestions the UFC may ditch their historic pay-per-view model this year, Joe Rogan has made a case to retain them — as part of an interesting deal with Netflix.
The promotion, whose exclusive broadcast deal with North American giant ESPN comes to a close next year, is currently in the market for a new broadcast partner. And reports suggest that since the turn of the year, the Octagon leader may land with streaming platform Netflix. This comes off the back of a recent deal between Netflix and fellow TKO Group Holdings, WWE.
And earlier this week, to boot, Mark Shapiro — the CEO of TKO Group Holdings admitted negotiations were underway for a broadcast deal involving the UFC. But stressed that ESPN is still heavily involved in those talks, not just the long-mooted Netflix.
“We’re in discussions at this time with various third parties regarding the UFC’s rights,” Shapiro said during a quarterly TKO financial call. But as far as Rogan is concerned, the promotion should potentially look to retain the PPV model. And in that thought, a Netflix deal would be the most feasible option to generate a whole new fan base for combat sports.
“Like, if the UFC was $5 instead of $70, would you actually make more money. Because you get millions of downloads or millions?” Rogan asked on his podcast this week, adding, “It’s pretty immense [the user base on Netflix]. It’s gotta be bigger than ESPN+.”
“Netflix has 94 million monthly active users,” the JRE host noted. “The company has over 300 million paid global subscribers. So 300 million worldwide,” added a clearly impressed Rogan.
And while the WWE hosts their PLE (premium live event) format on Netflix, included with the price of the streaming platform, the UFC has admitted they may weigh up their own relationship with a PPV model.
Dana White unsure if PPV model will suit new UFC deal
Heavily boasting about numerous PPV buy rates in the past, UFC CEO Dana White hinted that the model may be gone with the wind sooner rather than later.
Of course, they boasted their biggest-selling pay-per-view at UFC 229 back in 2018. Conor McGregor and Khabib Nurmagomedov drew a staggering 2.4 million buys that night in October, setting a new record in the process.
But with negotiations in full flight, White claimed earlier this year that a world where the UFC’s flagship events aren’t pay-per-view may be on the horizon.
“It’s usually we do what works for the network,” Dana White said last month.
“What do they want to do? Do they want to just put it on their air? Or do they want to do pay-per-view? Do they want to put it behind a paywall? I don’t know any of those things. Tuesday, the window opens. And we start talking to other networks, and we’ll get more into that,” he told the media.
Notably, the UFC had reportedly come under fire by ESPN after a series of poor PPV buys — to the point where fighters with PPV points in their contract reportedly found the clause a pointless addition.
