Dana White isn’t buying that 1.3 million Homes paid to watch Paul vs. Danis: ‘You’re lying through your teeth’
UFC CEO Dana White isn’t buying recent reports claiming that Misfit’s Boxing’s latest pay-per-view event, ‘The PRIME Card’ pulled in more than a million buys.
Promoting a dozen PPVs per year, White knows a thing or two about the pay-per-view business. In particular, how difficult it can be to promote an event that fight fans are willing to shell out their hard-earned money to see. That’s why he has a hard time believing that an event headlined by PRIME Energy partners KSI and Logan Paul sold upwards of 1.3 million buys in October.
“I haven’t heard about anybody selling a lot of pay-per-views lately,” White said during his appearance on The Full Send podcast. “Let me tell you how hard it is to sell 1.3 million pay-per-view buys, and if you did sell 1.3 million — if you sold 700,000 pay-per-view buys — they’d put putting on fights f*cking 10 times a year.
“When you hear those kinds of numbers fly around the pay-per-view world, they’re lying motherf*ckers. Don’t ever believe that sh*t” (h/t MMA Fighting).
While influencer boxing has seen a significant uptick in events and popularity over the last few years, White suggested that if they were really scoring seven-figure figure buy rates, they’d pump out the product a whole lot more.
“You know how much money that is if they cut a deal and did 1.3 million pay-per-view buys?” White said. “Anybody who’s been on any of these f*cking horrible boxing shows, and I like Logan [Paul] and some of these guys that are involved in this s***, if you come out and you say you did 1.3 million pay-per-view buys on your event, you’re lying through your f*cking teeth. Lying through your teeth.
“The amount of money you’d f*cking make, they’d be doing pay-per-views all the f*cking time. Let me tell you what, every pay-per-view distributor out there would want them, and Showtime wouldn’t have went out of business.”
Needless to say, Dana White is not a fan of the influencer boxing scene, believing that it takes away from professional fighters who have dedicated their lives to combat sports.
“It’s much cheaper and a much better experience [just to watch the highlights],” White said. “The production sucks. The f*cking fights end up sucking. It’s sh*tty boxing is what it is.
“I’m not trying to [put them down], I don’t care what these guys do. These are just facts. To say that they’re doing any numbers, all these different people have tried to invest in this sh*t, and they tried to raise money and do all this other bullsh*t, people would be fighting over them and throwing f*cking truckloads of money at them if they did anywhere near a million buys. None of those f*cking guys are doing a million buys.”
