Conor McGregor Breaks ESPN+ PPV Record With UFC 246
Conor McGregor made his highly-anticipated return to the Octagon last month at the UFC 246 pay-per-view (PPV) event.
The Irishman took out Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone in their welterweight clash in only 40 seconds. Now, according to a report from MMA Fighting, the PPV numbers for McGregor’s return look tremendous. The UFC 246 PPV hauled in over one million streams on ESPN+. That makes UFC 246 the first streaming event in history to break that number.
Per Disney chairman and CEO Rober Iger, who announced the full Walt Disney Company Q1 2020 earnings on a recent call, ESPN+ had 6.6 million subscribers on December 31, 2019. Now, that number has jumped up to 7.6 million subscribers. Iger credited UFC 246 and McGregor’s return for the massive jump in numbers. Also, there were 500,000 new subscribers who signed up for ESPN+ just to watch McGregor vs. Cerrone.
The UFC has also been a huge part of ESPN+’s subscribers overall. At the beginning of last year, ESPN+ had 1.4 million subscribers. The number held at nearly two million a month later after over 500,000 people signed up to watch the UFC on ESPN+ 1. That card was headlined by a flyweight title fight between Henry Cejudo and T.J. Dillashaw.
McGregor vs. Cerrone’s PPV numbers surpassed that of Logan Paul vs. KSI, which did 814,000 buys. However, Dave Melter pointed out that there was a big price difference in the two shows, as UFC 246 cost almost $70, while Paul vs. KSI only cost $10. With that being said, UFC 246 brought in $70 million in streaming revenue.
What do you think about McGregor and Cerrone hauling in over one million PPV buys?
