The UFC broke the pay-per-view industry's all-time records for a single year of business and generated over $200 million in revenue during 2006, according to two credible media outlets.
Many fans of both boxing and MMA have wondered whether the UFC has already surpassed boxing. The numbers show that not only is the UFC bigger than boxing today, but it's also bigger than boxing ever was from a PPV revenue standpoint. The all-time record year for boxing was 1999, with just over $200 million in combined PPV revenue, and the UFC broke that record by over $20 million in 2006.
Leading the way was UFC 66 (Chuck Liddell vs. Tito Ortiz), which drew approximately 1,050,000 pay-per-view buys and grossed approximately $41.95 million in PPV revenue.
Prior to UFC 66, Zuffa publicly and repeatedly predicted that the event would draw 1.2 million PPV buys. While the event fell short of meeting that prediction, the total of 1,050,000 still topped boxing's biggest event of 2006 (Oscar de la Hoya vs. Ricardo Mayorga) by more than 100,000 buys, as De la Hoya vs. Mayorga drew approximately 925,000 PPV buys.
The UFC's second-biggest pay-per-view event of 2006 was UFC 61 (Tito Ortiz vs. Ken Shamrock and Tim Sylvia vs. Andrei Arlovski), which drew approximately 775,000 PPV buys and grossed approximately $30.96 million in PPV revenue.
The UFC's third-biggest PPV event of 2006 was UFC 60 (Matt Hughes vs. Royce Gracie), which drew a final number of approximately 620,000 PPV buys and generated approximately $24.77 million in PPV revenue.
Several other UFC PPV events in 2006 surpassed the mark of 500,000 PPV buys (and thus $20 million in PPV revenue), as the UFC's average for its ten PPV events in 2006 was approximately 522,500 buys per event.
Even if one were to take the three biggest UFC events of 2006 out of the equation, the seven remaining UFC PPVs in 2006 still managed to average approximately 400,000 PPV buys per event.
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The only records that the UFC has not broken are the all-time boxing records for individual events, which still stand at approximately 2.0 million buys for a heavyweight fight and approximately 1.4 million buys for a non-heavyweight fight. The upcoming fight between Oscar de la Hoya and Floyd Mayweather, Jr. is expected to break the 1.4 million mark and perhaps even approach the 2.0 million mark.
While the perception is that boxing's PPV business has rapidly declined, the fact of the matter is that 2006 was the second-biggest year in boxing history at the PPV box office, with gross PPV revenue of $177 million. That would likely be seen as a far bigger news story than it currently is, if it weren't for the fact that the UFC blew away boxing's all-time records during the same year.
