In today's great interview with Tito Ortiz over at MMA Mania, Tito states that he thinks fighters salaries should total about 30-40% of the revenue made by UFC on each major show. Using UFC 84, we can predict what this pay scale might look like.
First, I am going to assume the show did 600,000 buys. There are indications that it may be slightly higher or lower than this, so we'll just assume this even number. My impression is that they get about $22 per buy, while the rest goes to the cable companies, so this brings us to $13,200,000 in PPV revenue. The gate was $5,100,000, and if you add in the merchandise sales and other ways they made money on this show in terms of online webcast sales, worldwide buys, and more, you can probably round this up to about $19,000,000.
Thirty percent of this would mean that the combined purse of fighters would be around $5,700,000. I can guarantee that the actual combined purse of UFC 83 was nowhere close to either of these figures. Figures were not released, but I would be shocked if the combined purse was over $2,500,000. GSP probably made about a million after bonuses, Rich made somewhere in the 500-750k range, and after that it is a lot of low numbers.
As of now combined purses tend to be closer to 10% of total revenue on live events than 30-40%. I'm not saying Tito's number is inherently fair or anything, this is just the way it is.