2010 26 Apr

WEC 48 Pay Per View Sales Numbers Exceeding Expectations?

WEC 48 represents the promotion’s first foray into the world of Pay Per View, with observers eagerly anticipating how the event performs from a business perspective. Some have speculated as low as 50,000 pay per view buys, while UFC president Dana White has offered up more optimistic projections in the neighborhood of 150,000. Tapology, using pre-fight online interest and buzz as a tool for forecasting pay per view results, is similarly without any historical WEC numbers to draw from in order to help make a prediction. Despite this, the online interest in WEC 48 has been very strong, leading us to make a bold prediction that the event will exceed all expectations and settle around 240,000 buys. We could have forecast even higher, but tried to remain conservative and discounted our projection. Breakdown below.

Tapology translates the volume of online interest for the main and co-main event fighters into an absolute “buzz score” in order to model a pay per view forecast. The higher each individual fighter’s buzz score, the more people who have been searching and reading about that fighter online in the days leading up to the event.

Featherweight champion Jose Aldo headlines the card by defending his belt against the most popular fighter in the WEC, Urijah Faber. While there is also a co-main event title fight in the lightweight division, it is the Faber/Aldo main event that is driving virtually all of the interest in this card. Faber, the charismatic long-time poster boy for the WEC, is exceeding the interest being generated for Jose Aldo by a decent margin, and for comparison purposes is generating far more interest than BJ Penn did for UFC 112, and nearly as much as Anderson Silva. Indeed, it is singularly the Faber/Aldo fight that will make or break this card, with casual fans almost completely unaware of the other bouts taking place.

Fighter	Pre-Fight Buzz Score
Urijah Faber	20.4
Jose Aldo	16.9
Ben Henderson	5.0
Donald Cerrone	3.4
Total	45.7

The combined score for the four main and co-main event fighters is 45.7, directly in line with the levels seen for UFC’s 108 and 109. Those cards featured main events of Rashad Evans vs Thiago Silva and Randy Couture vs Mark Coleman, and both did just around 300,000 PPV buys. Neither fight was a title fight, and neither fight had the significance within its weight class as does Urijah Faber vs Jose Aldo, which would suggest that a similar number of serious fans will gladly order this event. The big unknown, of course, is what the absence of strong UFC branding will mean as far as pulling in borderline serious fans and casuals. The presence of the regular UFC marketing machine including Dana White, Joe Rogan and Mike Goldberg, and Spike TV prelims may be enough to make the branding a non-issue, or at least blurred enough such that most consumers simply assume it is a regular UFC event like any other.

To be conservative and not throw out a pay per view prediction that completely disregards the WEC brand risk, Tapology is discounting our model’s prediction somewhat, and forecasting a slightly more down-to-earth figure in the neighborhood of 240,000 buys. A result anywhere near this level would be a huge win for the WEC and Zuffa, and simply eclipsing Dana White’s much lower 150,000 figure would be considered a success. We expect that to happen, plus room for plenty of upside.

Event	Main & Co-Main Event Pre-Fight Buzz Score	Reported/Estimated Pay Per View Buys
UFC 100	156.9	1,600,000
UFC 101	83.1	900,000
UFC 102	46.6	435,000
UFC 103	56.2	375,000
UFC 104	81.1	500,000
UFC 106	63.9	375,000
UFC 107	67.5	620,000
UFC 108	43.4	300,000
UFC 109	46.6	285,000
UFC 110	50.1	240,000
UFC 111	77.3	770,000 (trending estimate)
UFC 112	58.1	500,000 (trending estimate)
WEC 48	45.7	240,000 (pre-fight forecast)