Did Paramount really overpay for the UFC? What the data tells us so far
Our go-to expert, the Entertainment Strategy Guy, on combat sports and media rights.
If you know the history of American television, you also know that combat sports is often a leading indicator of the future.
In the 1940s & 1950s, Gorgeous George became one of television’s first wrestling superstars through appearances on DuMont and other early TV networks. Classy Freddie Blassie terrified pencil-neck geeks in Los Angeles on KTLA. Rikidozan shattered Japanese TV records in the 1950s & 1960s. Vince McMahon Sr. syndicated his World Wide Wrestling Federation TV show via WOR in New York in the 1970s. Vince McMahon Jr. would expand this strategy to include nationwide syndication in the 1980s. HBO aired WWF matches from Madison Square Garden. Joe Blanchard’s Southwest Championship Wrestling had a high-profile TV show on USA Network in the early 1980s. Vince McMahon would soon take over that slot with Prime Time Wrestling.
Then came the advent of Pay Per View and Wrestlemania during the launch of MTV. Hulkamania was running wild. Mike Tyson became a legend.
The 1990s saw PPV expand beyond wrestling into boxing mega-fights via TVKO and eventually the UFC.
Vince McMahon changed cable on Monday Nights with RAW and Eric Bischoff raised the stakes with live Monday Nitro wrestling events.
McMahon won the wrestling wars and eventually became a billionaire (on paper) while turning WWE into a publicly-traded company.
Then McMahon made his biggest gamble ever — The WWE Network. What on earth was he thinking?
Turns out, Vince was always ahead of the game. We have an 80-plus year track record of fight sports being a bleeding edge of new media rights deals and technological invention.
Guess who had key inside access to some of the important media rights data for fight sports over the last two decades? Ari Emanuel. The personal agent for both Vince McMahon and Donald Trump also represented the UFC when they signed their major media rights deal with Fox Sports in 2011.
Five years later, Ari Emanuel and Endeavor bought the UFC for $4 billion dollars.
This is a very long-winded but historically accurate way of saying that you can’t tell the story of American media without discussing combat sports.
This is why the future of UFC on Paramount means so much for all of us.
As Zach recently outlined, TKO has created a multi-monopoly with the largest streaming platforms. This includes Zuffa Boxing on Paramount and RAW on Netflix.
If TKO succeeds as a linchpin for Paramount’s footprint expansion globally, it will have big ramifications for future media rights deals and potential investment in the combat sports space.
We can’t tell you what the future is going to look like, but we can certainly call on our go-to expert to tell us what the current streaming environment looks like. Enter our number one expert, The Entertainment Strategy Guy.
For our paid subscribers, Nate recently had a chance to sit down with ESG to ask our most requested reader questions about UFC, Paramount, the Freedom 250 event at The White House, Conor McGregor’s return, Ari Emanuel’s maneuvers, and whether or not Paramount can eventually remove political branding as part of its core identity.
After our Q & A session, Zach will have his response to ESG’s answers and how the recent Freedom 250 & Conor McGregor UFC 329 viewership numbers fit into the bigger picture.
Your questions & ESG’s answers regarding UFC on Paramount
Entertainment Strategy Guy: First off, thank you for asking me these smart questions. I’m a big, big fan of The MMA Draw’s coverage. I never would have guessed that I needed an MMA/fight sports newsletter in my life, but I read every issue because the analysis and business coverage is so good. So I’m happy to share what I know with your readers.
