Ronda Rousey Mocks UFC Freedom 250 Viewership Numbers After Her MVP Event Drew More Eyes
Ronda Rousey is enjoying herself, and the UFC is going to have to sit with it.
Rousey and Jake Paul both took aim at the UFC on Sunday after viewership data dropped for the promotion’s historic Freedom 250 event at the White House. The numbers were impressive on their own. They just happened to come in below what Most Valuable Promotions did with their debut MMA event in May.
The UFC Freedom 250 card, held on the South Lawn as part of the country’s 250th anniversary celebration, averaged 7 million viewers in the United States on Paramount+. With Latin America included, the event reached 8.2 million on average and pulled 17 million unique viewers across the broadcast.
Those are big numbers. They are not MVP numbers.
The May event from Jake Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions, headlined by Rousey submitting Gina Carano via armbar in 17 seconds, averaged 9.3 million U.S. viewers on Netflix and peaked near 17 million globally. That is a clean win on the average viewer number, and it has clearly given Paul and Rousey something to talk about.
“As a boxing promoter it feels good waking up today being the biggest MMA promoter,” Paul posted on X on Thursday.
Rousey, never one to leave a target alone, fired her own response at UFC chief business officer Hunter Campbell. “Lmao! Kiss my (expletive) Hunter Campbell,” she wrote.
The UFC will argue that the Freedom 250 event was a more substantial product. They have a fair case. Justin Gaethje pulled off a major upset against Ilia Topuria for the lightweight title, and the card was packed with competitive bouts that produced real action across the night. The Rousey-Carano main event ended in 17 seconds, and while the storyline drew massive interest, the fight itself was a glorified showcase.
That distinction matters when you are evaluating which event was a better MMA product. It does not matter at all when you are evaluating which event drew more eyes.
This is the new MMA reality the UFC is going to have to deal with. For two decades, Dana White’s promotion was the only meaningful game in town. Bellator came and went. ONE Championship built a respectable Asian footprint. The PFL has been chasing relevance for years. None of them ever produced a number that made the UFC worry about its mainstream pull.
MVP just did. And they did it with a card built around a 39-year-old Rousey making her return from a long retirement and an actress who had not fought professionally in over a decade.
The mainstream appeal of MMA is bigger than any single promotion now. Netflix proved it could put up massive numbers with the Paul versus Tyson event in 2024, and now they have proven it again with a women’s MMA card built around personalities the casual audience knows by name.
The UFC will keep doing what it does. The promotion is still the gold standard for elite-level talent, the home of the title belts that matter, and the engine that drives most of the sport’s revenue. But the days of being the only relevant brand in mixed martial arts appear to be over.
Rousey and Paul are going to keep talking. The UFC has earned every bit of the noise coming at them. The numbers do not lie, and Most Valuable Promotions has officially become a problem the UFC cannot ignore.
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.
