Las Vegas — Following Saturday’s UFC Vegas 119 card at the Meta Apex in Las Vegas, which saw Manel Kape finish Kyoji Horiguchi in a key flyweight fight, talk was still about last weekend’s UFC Freedom 250 at the White House.
That made up much of what UFC CEO and President Dana White was asked about following the event, including about the 17 million viewership number recently released by Paramount+ (for U.S. and Latin American total views, not average viewership).
With the UFC now a publicly traded company under TKO Group, the full numbers will no doubt be made public in an earnings call. White, however, sees the UFC as being in an envious place in the media landscape.
“From here on out with all the media, I’m not going to say about any of these other— we are not the same. We literally right now are competing with the NFL, the NBA, Major League Baseball, and the NHL,” White said following the latest Apex card, speaking with media outlets including Cageside Press. “If you think about where we sit in the pecking order of the top sports in the country, I don’t know this to be true but I f*cking guarantee you it is: the day we announced that we did a $7.7 billion dollar deal [with Paramount+], the executives at the NFL said ‘how the f*ck did we not get this money, and how did we not know that kind of money was sitting open? We’ll do games on Tuesday, Friday, Saturday.'”
The UFC’s deal with Paramount+ covers its U.S. broadcast rights, to the tune of $1.1 billion per year for seven years. Additional territories were later added on in smaller deals, with more likely to come.
“Then you’ve got the NBA, Major League Baseball’s looking for a new deal, and the NHL. If you look at where TV was 15 years ago, all these powerful cable channels and all this stuff, the cable industry has taken a nosedive,” White continued. “So what do you have left? You have NBC, ABC, CBS, and FOX, and then you have like three powerful streaming services. There’s a lot of people fighting over the same turf.”
White expects that, moving forward, the media landscape will consolidate further, with streaming taking over.
“Look at sh*t that I said ten years ago. I said, ‘when I grew up, there was channel 3, channel 5, channel 8, and channel 13.’ I believe that that’s going to exist again, but globally. Who’s it going to be? Netflix, Paramount, Disney, Youtube, the list goes on and on of all the people – it’s like the AI arms race right now, but with streaming.”
He also noted that the White House card was “physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausting for the entire staff,” telling Cageside Press that “everybody on my team is ready for a little bit of downtime.”
With new UFC rankings set to drop, Dana White addressed the change in format. And yes, humans will still be involved.
“Yeah. I’m going to do both. I’m going to do human, non-human, everyone look at it rankings. I think that neither will be perfect, but it’ll get us closer. The rankings that are going to come out on Monday make a lot more sense.” That send, White expects there to be some pushback, some arguing. “We’ll see how it plays out over the first year.”
Watch the full UFC Vegas 119 post-fight press conference with Dana White above.
