You’ll Sh*t The Bed When You Hear How Much Money The UFC Made In 2015

After a troublesome 2014, the UFC has undoubtedly bounced back in 2015 in terms of injuries, fights, and events overall.

Fans have been treated to a tremendous amount of fantastic action in the past year, and it’s clear that the UFC has benefited from that.

But just how successful was 2015 for the world’s largest mixed martial arts (MMA) promotion?

UFC CEO Lorenzo Fertitta recently spoke with CNN on the topic, admitting that the company took in a record-setting $600 million in total revenue in 2015. Fertitta also touched on the fact that the UFC has expanded the ways in which it can make revenue:

“We’ll generate about $600 million in revenue for the year 2015, which is a record for the company and it’s a fairly significant growth coming off 2014. The exciting part of the platform that we’ve built is that we’ve been able to embrace different tiers of revenue. We have our basic pay-per-view business, that is our biggest source of revenue. Then we have our media rights, which is really similar to rights that we sell to FOX for all of the programming we give them. And then we have embraced the over-the-top platforms, where we launched UFC Fight Pass, which is a subscription service of $9.99 per month where you can access the entire UFC library and we also put live exclusive UFC events from around the world on that format, as well as original programming. So we really have those three sources of revenue to generate, three ways to monetize our contacts.”

Ironically, despite the abundant success of the company as a whole, fighter pay has still grown as a glaring problem in the sport, at least amongst fighters themselves.

As for that problem, Fertitta claimed that MMA is an open-market, meaning that fighters have options as to where they can fight. Claiming that Bellator actually has more resources financially, the UFC CEO said that pay is essentially on the fighter rather than the promotion:

“At the end of the day, it’s an absolute open market. There are multiple bidders in the marketplace. In fact, our number one competitor is Bellator, which is owned by Viacom, which has significantly more resources than we do even though we are the leading brand in this space. The fact of the matter is, out top athletes are making mutli-millions of dollars. And what is happening is as the sport grows and compensation goes up and revenue goes up, you’re starting to see that the guys and girls at the top are commanding a larger share of that pie. I think you see that in every sport, every business. It’s the athletes who make a difference that people want to pay for that are commanding the big dollars.”

With more and more fighters seeming to test the waters of free agency, it doesn’t seem as if the issue will be going away any time soon.

While the company is thriving financially, does the UFC need to make a change regarding their fighters?