Report: UFC 142 Sells 225,000 Pay-Per-Views

Lesnar - Out for nearly all of 2011 due to TUF and diverticulitis
GSP - Fought once in April, waited 6 months to fight again but severely injured at the last minute. He’ll likely have 0-1 fights in 2012 due the recovery.
Rampage - only fought twice, but one of those fights was against a non-contender in Matt Hamill, and there wasn’t enough “beef” between him and Jones to match 114’s numbers.
Silva - Silva is not a big draw unless he has a high profile feud with his opponent. Silva-Belfort and Silva-Sonnen fits the bill, but Silva-Okami brought things back to reality about his drawing power. Note: big draw as in drawing ppv buys.

I think the UFC should consolidate their bigger fights on to fewer ppvs and up the buy-rates on already strong cards. If I had the option to get 500K-700K buys on one event versus < 350K buys from two different cards, I’d take the single event that can potentially hit in the 500K-700K range because I won’t have to spend twice the amount of money promoting, securing venues, paying fighter’s travel , and other expenses the UFC regularly has for every event they put on. This would be good for everyone, even Dana since he won’t have to travel nearly as much and stress himself out like he usually does.

One more thing, GSP fought on UFC 79, UFC 87, and UFC 100. What do those three cards have in common? GSP, after being a Jon Jones level ppv draw since winning the title the first time, piggybacked on cards featuring far greater draws than himself such as Chuck Liddell and Brock lesnar. UFC 94, had GSP in a rematch with LW champ BJ Penn that was hyped as much as Rampage-Evans was, and drew a lot of attention from casuals. After those 4 ppvs, GSP has now been headlining ppv cards for the most part on his own, and he’s now doing 700K+ every time now. I think there is a formula to making an exciting champion a GSP-like star, you need to have that champion, for example Jon Jones, piggyback off of headliners like GSP, and Lesnar as much as possible, and hope he puts on beautiful performances under the biggest spotlight possible. After the champion has had time in the spotlight, promote the hell out of any legitimate rivalry he may have with another contender and treat it like it is the biggest grudge match of the sport with a creative promotional angle so that the outside media, like ESPN, will be actually interested in covering it. Jon Jones already has Rashad Evans as a good rival, should he beat Phil Davis, but Jones should have previously been featured on a BIG card like Lesnar-Overeem or co-main eventing UFC on FOX 1.

This is eventually what will happen (say 3-5 years); presumably they’ll end up putting more events on the main Fox network, support it with FX and Fuel, and then do a few mega events on PPV (New Year’s, Memorial Day, 4th of July, etc.). The PPV model is much simpler, and the UFC’s infrastructure hasn’t really caught up to the increased demands and complexity of the network TV deal, but eventually I have to believe that they’ll shift their focus.