UFC 207 does more than 1 million pay-per-view buys

UFC 207 was big business for the UFC. Early estimates show that the stacked card did approximately 1.1 million pay-per-view buys.

The card, which occurred on December 30 of 2016, was headlined by a women’s bantamweight title fight between returning former champion Ronda Rousey, and reigning divisional queen Amanda Nunes. Nunes won this fight in the biggest way possible, stopping her foe with punches in a mere 48 seconds.

Given Rousey’s status as one of the biggest stars in MMA history, this card’s status as a massive PPV success is not exactly surprising. While Rousey’s return is undeniably the catalyst for UFC 207’s crossing the elusive 1 million buy threshold, however, sales were also helped by a highly hyped bantamweight title fight between champion Dominick Cruz and challenger Cody Garbrandt, which saw the latter pull off the win in an upset of the year contender.

Elsewhere on the pay-per-view portion of the UFC 207 lineup, we saw TJ Dillashaw defeat John Lineker at bantamweight, Dong Hyun Kim edge Tarec Saffiedine at welterweight, and Ray Borg defeat Louis Smolka at flyweight. Originally, the main card was expected to include a heavyweight rematch between former champions Cain Velasquez and Fabricio Werdum. Regrettably, however, a Velasquez injury forced the cancellation of this bout at the last minute.

With it’s 1.1 million buys, UFC 207 became the fifth pay-per-view of 2016 to cross the million-buy line. The other four were UFC 196, which was headlined by a last-minute welterweight bout between Conor McGregor and Nate Diaz, UFC 200, which featured names like Amanda Nunes, Miesha Tate, Brock Lesnar, Mark Hunt, Daniel Cormier and Anderson Silva, UFC 202, which was headlined by a McGregor-Diaz rematch, and UFC 205, which featured a whopping three title fights. All four generated more pay-per-view sales than UFC 207 – though that could have been different if Rousey had participated in the publicity side of things.

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