Ronda Rousey and Jake Paul Troll UFC Over Freedom 250 Viewership: ‘Biggest MMA Promoter’
The UFC threw an event on the South Lawn of the White House. Ronda Rousey and Jake Paul beat them in the ratings anyway.
UFC Freedom 250, held as part of the country’s 250th anniversary celebrations, averaged 7 million viewers on Paramount+ in the U.S. according to Nielsen and Adobe Analytics data. The card reached 8.2 million when Latin America was included and pulled 17 million unique viewers worldwide. By any normal measure, those are huge numbers for a single MMA card.
They were not bigger than Rousey vs. Gina Carano on Netflix in May. That fight averaged 9.3 million U.S. viewers and peaked near 17 million globally, all on the back of a 17-second armbar finish. Rousey and Paul did not let the gap go unnoticed.
“As a boxing promoter it feels good waking up today being the biggest MMA promoter,” Paul posted Friday.
Rousey was sharper. “Lmao! Kiss my (expletive) Hunter Campbell,” she said in response to a post by the UFC chief business officer.
The UFC Is Not Going to Like This
Dana White built the UFC by controlling the narrative around fight numbers. The promotion has spent two decades arguing that no other MMA event matters because no other promoter can match its production, its talent, or its audience. Most Valuable Promotions just did all three on a one-fight card.
That is the part Rousey and Paul are leaning on. They made a single fight a global event by putting it on Netflix, marketing it like a heavyweight title bout, and getting Rousey to come out of retirement at 39 years old. The result was 9.3 million viewers in the U.S. for a 17-second fight.
The UFC card was the bigger product. Freedom 250 had Justin Gaethje upsetting Ilia Topuria for the lightweight title. It had a stacked undercard. It happened at the White House on a holiday weekend with President-level promotion. By traditional measures it should have crushed.
It did not, because Rousey is a brand and Carano is a brand and Netflix is a brand. Three brands stacked together can beat a 90-minute pay-per-view card almost every time.
The UFC will tell you Paramount+ counts differently than Netflix. Paramount+ has fewer subscribers. The UFC numbers were also limited to a single English-language platform in the U.S. and Latin America, while Netflix has 280 million global subs. Those caveats are real. They are also the kind of caveats you make when you have lost a number.
White has been pushing MMA at the White House for years. Getting an actual presidential event was a long-running goal. The fact that the night will be remembered as much for the Rousey jab as the Gaethje knockout is the kind of small loss that drives White crazy.
Most Valuable Promotions is now two fights deep into its MMA experiment and has both numbers in the bank. The UFC monopoly is not over. The cracks are real.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
