Official Conor McGregor thread (part 5) *Read Mod Note in Post 1*

Ultimate Seduction wrote: »

Hopefully the boxing chat rots with the last thread

Alot of us would love to talk about upcoming MMA fights of his. Unfortunately that's not happening. He seems to be eyeing a Boxing fight with Pacquio.

So its either Boxing fights or his latest benders with hookers and blow. Those are the only things he's been good for lately.

chopperbyrne wrote: »

Can't see him ever fighting in the UFC again (outside of the ludicrously rumoured Floyd in the UFC fights), unless Dee leaves him and takes most of his money, and he loses the rest with poor business decisions/excessive drug use.

He might try to promote his own MMA fights, but can't see them being a draw without the UFC involved.

He's still under exclusive contract [which keeps getting extended as long as he's champion] If he tries to have MMA fights outside of the UFC then they'll have him in court very fast.

hewhoscares wrote: »

https://twitter.com/BCampbellCBS/status/941439010492346368

so turns out MayMac wasn't the 'biggest PPV ever' as numerous posters insisted it would be. The empty seats of the arena told us that much

A gate of $55,414,865.79 and 4.3 million North American buys is a stellar success, it quite obviously makes it the 2nd biggest fight in combat sports history across the board from PPV buys to Gate, but I was definitely one predicting it would eclipse the records.

It should have, too.

Mistakes were made from the outset in all areas.

The tickets should have been ready to go on sale around the time of the fever-pitch presser in Toronto when buzz was at its maximum. It was a further 22 days before Showtime released them via TicketMaster and, even then, they released them with in-built restrictions on the amount of tickets-per-person to 2 and to #verifiedfan only buyers.

In practice, they were trying to reduce the influence of ticket touts on the event but in reality that wasn't necessary. The tickets were priced so high to begin with, I doubt there was too much liquidity for the touts to bulk-buy the $10,000 and $5,000 tickets in the first place.

The biggest thing they did differently was not immediately offloading in bulk to Vegas hotels. That made up the majority of the May-Pac gate (only 500 tickets were available to the public) but they went a different route with this one.

In terms of the PPV numbers, Showtime made aggressive moves to prevent piracy in the May-Pac fight, employing teams to go across the country checking bar licenses etc but they either didn't have the time (or didn't care) to reciprocate that effort this time around.

The reality is the fight was watched live by well over 100 million people and, to hazard a guess, I'd imagine by well over 40 million in America. A more aggressive anti-piracy effort would probably have gained a few hundred thousand more legitimate purchasers, especially when you factor in bar licenses.

Then on fight night there were chronic problems with the NeuLion stream, we will never know how many tried to buy the fight but gave up to go look for a free stream. The problems were to the extent that the UFC completely cut ties with NeuLion, who had been their PPV provider for years and signed a new deal with FiteTV.

It certainly had the potential to breeze past 5 million buys and the $72.1 million gate record because demand for the fight was astronomical. Showtime, Neulion and, to a lesser extent, the UFC and TicketMaster butchered things at almost every step along the way.

There's confidentiality agreements all over the shop so nobody knows for sure but if you take $600 million as the complete revenue number and work with the best public reporting, that puts the UFC's revenue for the fight at close to $80 million, and Showtimes at $110 million, so it's no wonder Dana seemed pretty confident 2017 was their best year yet.