Conor McGregor has now broken PPV records in MMA and boxing…
While Dana White and the UFC have yet to officially announce the PPV buyrate for Mayweather vs McGregor, a recently uploaded video appears to leak the information. If correct, the event will have shattered the previous PPV record by almost 33%.
The previous record was 4.6 million purchases, which was for the much maligned Mayweather vs Pacquiao fight. Unlike with Mayweather vs Pacquiao, however, Conor vs. Floyd wasn’t so lacklustre that it’ll cause people to stay away from purchasing future boxing events. If anything, the excitement generated from Mayweather vs McGregor amongst casual fans could actually help the upcoming PPV fight between Canelo Alvarez and Gennady Golovkin on September 16th.
Despite Oscar de la Hoya’s best efforts to portray Mayweather vs McGregor as the end of boxing, he may actually stand to benefit from the fight’s success.
UFC Now Offering Refunds
That the PPV is believed to have shattered records helps explain why so many PPV providers, including UFC’s website, were unable to handle the amount of traffic. Numerous fans reported being unable to order the fight, although it is not clear what percentage of fans ran into this difficulty.
Technical difficulties and problems with customers being able to order the fight led to the bout being delayed. UFC’s website even began directing people to other ways to order the fight online.
Earlier today the UFC sent out the following statement regarding refunds:
“We always try to put on the biggest and most exciting fights,” White said on Tuesday. “We want our fans to have the best experience when watching our events. Unfortunately, we didn’t deliver the way we wanted on Saturday because of NeuLion’s technical issues on UFC.tv. As usual, we always take care of our fans and will fix this.
“We have started processing refunds immediately for anyone that could not access the fight after purchase.”
The statement subtly refers to the difficulties as “NeuLion’s technical issues”, as if basically to say the UFC is blameless.
Whether the UFC will be including the soon-to-be-refunded orders in the officially declared buyrate is not entirely clear. Also not entirely clear is who will be paying for all of the refunded orders.
Dana White Announces Mayweather vs. McGregor Buyrate
A video which appears to show Dana White speaking to Urijah Faber and Snoop Dogg about how well the fight did has been uploaded online. UFC Hall of Famer, Urijah Faber, is the one filming the video. It was filmed yesterday in Las Vegas at the Tuesday Night Contenders show.
Wow. In this Instagram story post by Urijah Faber, Dana White says #MayweatherMcGregor did 6.5M PPV buys. pic.twitter.com/JBJGNUDy7q
— Chamatkar Sandhu (@SandhuMMA) August 30, 2017
A 6.5 million buyrate would almost top Mayweather vs Pacquiao’s numbers by 2 million.
Mayweather vs Oscar de la Hoya was purchased 2.4 million times while Tyson vs Lennox Lewis was purchased by 2 million. Mayweather vs Canelo Alvarez was purchased by 2.2 million and will now be bumped down to 4th all-time on this list.
The official numbers should be unveiled in the coming days. Should Dana’s projections turn out to be true, it will be hard to argue that Conor vs Floyd wasn’t the most anticipated fight in the history of combat sports.
