Exactly. Even if a lot of people were there for Serra vs. Hughes… they will have saw Machida’s potential. Hopefully, those fans begin buying PPVs for Machida.

You really think Silva’s color has something to do with it? There are a number of black fighters that I thing bring in great numbers, I think it’s more along the lines of his lack of english skills than the color of skin if we wanted to talk about intangibles.

1.) Good point. Evans had the exposure to support the event as well, and his huge knockout over Chuck Liddell definitely turned heads.

2.) I think his English speaking capabilities outweigh his color. I’d argue that Rampage is black, yet he draws. I think Silva’s speaking abilities hurt him significantly.

3.) Machida has much better English, but he’s also somewhat of a shit talker as well. I like his confidence in the fight game, and it translates to producing a little more hype. It also opens up the possibility for opponents to talk back. Good points on the Bruce Lee, Karate Kid, etc.

I think a big part of it was people tuning in to see Rashad get his mouth shut. I don’t think people were necessarily rooting for Machida but I think they were rooting against Rashad. And that turned Machida into an instant favorite for the fans. I also think it was a big deal to everybody that both fighters were undefeated going in to this fight.

Also Machida hasn’t had to knock off anyone popular to get where he is. Unlike Rashad and Rampage, he never beat Chuck or Wandy or Forrest and pissed off a huge segment of fans.

I think this is a severely overlooked part of Silva’s lack of popularity. I also think it would have been less detrimental to him if he’d beaten Rich in a close, competitive fight. Utterly destroying him twice, on the other hand…

Yeah, but his numbers have been poor dating back more events than just recent ones.

After the UFN night when he KTFO’d James Irvin on free TV, they had pushed him very hard.
 The Cote fight just left people flat who were open to giving him a chance.
The Leites fight was the kiss of death.
someone should do a chart of Anderson’s hype and draws over time. It’ll show that he knocked off a champ (Rich Franklin) who was a relatively, weak draw and then was building a little bit of steam with a series of impressive wins but still not building much of a draw.
Then he has the Irvin fight, does slightly better with Cote (but only barely) and then flatlines.
The thing to remember is that drawing 300,000 buys as a headliner in 2007 like Rich Franklin did was one thing, but drawing that same 300,000 in 2009 is a whole different matter. The middleweight champ has gone from a weak draw to a drag on the numbers.

Liddell vs. Shogun was the big fight everyone was looking forward to at UFC 97. I think Liddell vs. Shogun was the anchor by far.

3. Huge brand awareness based on the videogame. Check out "UFC" on google trends the week of the game. The brand awareness exploded with it.

This is a really good point. I wonder how the videogame franchise will affect their buyrates going forward. Perhaps that exposure means even really weak cards will draw almost 500k buys (I guess this weekend will serve as an initial barometer for that, since it’s a European card). Or perhaps it will only lead to a very small increase over the long term, but a good bump every time a new iteration is released.

I’ve never heard anyone refer to Rashad as a draw, just because he was the champ doesn’t mean he automatically turns into a PPV king. I think the two main factors in the buyrate for this event were a) the LHW title fight between 2 undefeated fighters, and b) the huge boost the UFC has received since the end of last year with Lesnar/Couture and The Ultimate 2008. I’m not sure Hughes/Serra was as big a factor as a lot of people give it credit for, that hype has cooled down considerably since their days in TUF and neither of them have the kind of mystique that they did back then with Serra having recently beaten GSP and Hughes still being considered one of the top 2 or 3 at his weight back then. I’m sure it helped the buys but I think the main thing drawing people to this card was Rashad and Machida.