How Much Should a UFC Event Cost? On Pay-Per-View, Piracy, and the Future of UFC Broadcasting

How much should a UFC pay-per-view cost? Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that it’s a pretty good one. Not spectacular, but not the bottom of the scale either. What’s a fair price for an entire evening of top-level combat sports?

It turns out fans might not be the only ones asking this question. During Thursday’s quarterly earnings call, TKO Group Holdings President Mark Shapiro addressed some of the parent company’s concerns about ESPN’s pricing of UFC pay-per-view events.

“ESPN and Disney have been very aggressive, if you want to call it that, with the pricing of the pay-per-views and they have complete control over that,” Shapiro said. “But they have control given what they pay us for those rights. Over the period of our partnership, they probably went a little faster and a little higher than we would have liked.”

In other words, it wasn’t the UFC’s idea to raise the price of pay-per-views from $59.99 in 2018 to $79.99 today. And according to Shapiro, the UFC’s parent company suspects that the rapid increase in cost to consumers is why “piracy rates have really gone up” for UFC pay-per-views recently.

The UFC’s war on online pirates has been long and ineffective. While UFC president Dana White has occasionally made bold and hostile claims about targeting illegal streaming sites, there’s little evidence that he’s actually done any of the things he says he’s done.

Pirated streams still exist for every UFC event. If you ask them, many loyal fans of the sport will tell you that they rarely or never pay for UFC pay-per-views. The UFC has been aggressive in getting fight videos removed from YouTube and social media sites, but if you search social media for clips of finishes or sometimes even entire fights moments after they’ve ended, you can still find them quite easily.

The pirates continue to sail with impunity. Perhaps even flourish. Years of efforts to rein them in, dating back to former UFC co-owner Lorenzo Fertitta’s testimony before Congress on the subject in 2009, have done almost nothing to stop them. So what now?

If you talk to anti-piracy experts, they’ll tell you that price is the single most important factor in online piracy. Here, the UFC is facing a problem on multiple fronts. Not only has ESPN raised the cost of each pay-per-view by about a third over the past six years, it has also more than doubled the price of the ESPN+ subscription, which is required to even have the option to buy a UFC pay-per-view in the US.

It doesn’t help that plenty of fans have reported issues with ESPN+ on the technical front. Last month’s UFC 304 pay-per-view was interrupted by a seemingly years-old image of Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger for no apparent reason. ESPN+ streams have also been known to mutate, freeze, or simply degrade to a blank, black screen, sometimes during key moments during fights.

All of this seems especially relevant now that the UFC is nearing the end of its broadcast rights deal with ESPN. Companies like Netflix and Amazon have shown increased interest in streaming live sports. White has floated the possibility that the UFC could split its product across multiple streaming platforms, similar to the NFL’s model.

Depending on the cost and accessibility of those platforms, it may not be that dramatic a change from the current model. It’s clear that the UFC already offers several levels of its product.

At the top are the pay-per-views, where fans must pay nearly $100 a month (if you factor in an ESPN+ subscription) for title fights and big attractions. Then there are the UFC Fight Night events, which typically fall into two categories: respectable and disposable.

An example of the former is this past Saturday’s UFC on ABC event in Abu Dhabi. It featured some big names, like Umar Nurmagomedov and Cory Sandhagen, and took place in a real arena with a full house. For an example of the other type of Fight Night event, however, you only have to look at this Saturday’s offering. It’s led by a heavyweight rematch that nobody asked for, aired live from what is essentially a UFC warehouse with a small, tepid audience.

Under the current deal, the UFC has no real incentive to offer fans anything better or more appealing than that. It just gets paid to put on these events, regardless of whether people watch them. It’s pure content production. Not even the UFC president bothers to attend all of these events.

This is a problem, but perhaps also an opportunity. If the UFC is going to offer multiple versions of its product, varying greatly in quality, it’s not hard to imagine a world where these iterations are spread across multiple platforms.

But here’s where it gets tricky. The fighters who use the star power to make UFC pay-per-views special? They have to start somewhere. They have to gradually build the fan base that eventually justifies the high prices to see them perform.

And if people are turning off at the lower end of the UFC product, how do they figure out who matters and why? How complicated can you make the pipeline from rookie to contender to champion before you lose too much of your audience along the way?

That’s the question the UFC and its parent company will have to answer in the upcoming round of broadcast rights negotiations. And doing it right without overwhelming fans may be harder than they think.