More Google data on UFC 103 vs. Mayweather/Marquez
By Jim Murphy September 20th, 2009This is a Google comparison of online interest in the search terms ‘UFC 103′ and ‘Mayweather Marquez’. They pretty much speak for themselves. Interestingly, there’s little difference between the ‘Worldwide’ comparison data (shown here) and the ‘United States’ data. Another interesting revelation is that the UFC 103 interest level is essentially a flat line, while the Mayweather Marquez interest level shows a slight upward trend for the past month and a very sharp upward trend in the past few days. What that seems to suggest is that the UFC is keeping their ‘core audience’ but not bringing in many casual and/or mainstream sports fans, while the Mayweather/Marquez fight was able to more successfully promote itself to an audience outside of fight sport hardcores.
This is the same search with the term ‘Franklin Belfort’ added per reader suggestion. That search term basically flatlines and doesn’t change the result of the two search term comparison above:
September 20th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
f+ck boring boxing and punk Mayweather who would rather pay 600,000 grand fines rather than cut 2 pounds. MMA rules for my buck!
September 20th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
It’ll be interesting to see the PPV buyrates…and as a fan of both and having watched both last night Mayweather’s performance was incredible. He may not be a ‘character guy’ outside of the ring but when he steps between the ropes he’s one of the best ever…
September 20th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Shouldn’t your UFC data points include the sum of (UFC 103 and Franklin/Belfort)? When anyone asked, I was going to watch the Franklin/Belfort fight (not UFC 103). Whereas the Mayweather fight doesn’t really go under any other name…
September 20th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Consider it done
See above–I did a comparison of all three search terms you suggested.
September 20th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Is this something to be very concerned about in terms of the future of the UFC and mixed martial arts in general? I always hear talk about MMA continuing to grow in popularity and overtake boxing by a wide margin but is this indication that maybe that MMA has peaked in the US or is it just a case of the card for ufc 103 not being big enough?
September 20th, 2009 at 8:15 pm
gday guys, i think youre spot-on Arnold - Belfort/Franklin does not equate to Mayweather V anyone. Mayweather is top of the tree in boxing promotion. Mayweather/Pacquaio would outrate all UFC contests, to have a comparable UFC bout you would need Silva v Machida, Fedor et al.
IMHO, the UFC needs to slow down its events & start to work on its ‘education’ shows, channels. Historical fights, history of the sport itself. People have noone to relate to yet and boxing has a natural history in every country, for UFC to compete with.
September 20th, 2009 at 8:35 pm
I think you’re reading too much into this. The best boxer in the world makes his comeback after a year off, I would expect the boxing match to have better buy rates than the UFC fight. Franklin is a good fighter, but not a huge draw, and Belfort is only known to the older UFC fans or hardcore MMA fans. The same with Frank Trigg, and Cro Cop hasn’t impressed the casual UFC fan enough to pay for his fight.
September 21st, 2009 at 11:22 am
for more than 15 years the family gathers for carne asada on big boxing fight nights, and the event is referred to as “La pelea” - “The fight”. This time “the fight” was a gathering for a brock lesnar(champion) bout. the main event is about to start and all family starts to squeeze in the living room to watch “la pelea”. grandma walks in and sits down. the fight starts and within a minute grandma gets up, murmurs something, and starts walking out with grandpa. she said “yo pense que era boxeo” - “i thought it was boxing”. first and last time we order a UFC fight at home. boxing will remain as the family tv sport, along with soccer.
September 22nd, 2009 at 7:39 am
@ webmandman your story sounds a lot similar to mine.
whenever i watch boxing is with the family and whenever i watch ufc is with the friends and the girlfriend. though i’d prefer spending time with my friend i’d rather be with the family.
September 22nd, 2009 at 7:56 am
I’ve done some more research on the Google trends leading up to both events broken down by country. The results are interesting–I’ll see if I can get the data into a workable form to post but here’s the basics–in the US, Mayweather/Marquez had more than twice the search interest the week before the fight than UFC 103. In Canada, the interest in both events was lower than in the US but UFC103 had roughly a 1/3 more search traffic than Mayweather/Marquez.
Here’s what I think may be real basis of the superior performance of the boxing–in Mexico, interest in the Mayweather/Marquez fight was the same as in the US. That’s not surprising given Marquez’s popularity among Mexican fans and the passion for boxing in the country. The UFC? Its search traffic the week before the fight in Mexico was negligible–Google’s trending graphs gave it a zero ranking.
In Europe, there was significantly less interest in both events than in North America though the boxing still trended higher.
This gave me another thought–could it be that Dana White’s insipid attacks on boxing in general and Marquez in particular (he referred to him alternately as ‘whats his name’ and ‘a nobody’) undermine the UFC’s efforts to gain traction in the Latino market? It sure won’t help things..
Ultimately, I’m hoping the powers that be in both MMA and boxing will pull their heads out of their collective asses and realize that there’s potentially HUGE fanbase they could attract in the other sport. While there’s always going to be a segment who prefers one sport over the other, most of the people I associate with both in the boxing biz and media and their MMA counterparts appreciate both. This site’s existence is a good example–we’re essentially a ’spin off’ of The Sweet Science boxing website. They had a great appreciation for the sport of MMA and the fighters who compete in it, and wanted to give it dedicated coverage. There’s plenty of people out there who share the same mentality, and its not rocket science to cross sell the two sports to the benefit of both.
The UFC seems to be trying to attract more of a teenager/WWE fanbase with their promotion of Brock Lesnar and Kimbo Slice along with Dana’s potty mouth gibberish rants about not only boxing but every fighter not under contract to Zuffa. That’s not only insulting and demeans the promotion and the sport, but it also goes against all of the demographic data about the changing face of the MMA audience. Until recently, it was primarily 18-35 year old males. The greater growth has been at the top end–attracting more 35+ fans into the sport. It sure seems to be a serious tactical error to attract a younger demographic at the expense of the segment that is showing the most growth.
September 22nd, 2009 at 9:00 am
Ufc fans know to visit ufc.com for fight info for any ufc event. I love boxing and mma but never run a search for ufc events as I do for boxing. You need to run a search for boxing events because the web address is always unique. I just go to ufc.com for each event.
September 22nd, 2009 at 9:18 am
Uh, Mike, you’re telling someone who runs a MMA website that MMA fans don’t go anywhere *but* UFC.com for news and information? Sorry, that answer doesn’t fly. If that were the case, there would be no need for websites like ours and the other MMA news and commentary sites because we wouldn’t have any traffic. One interesting tendency of MMA fans online is that they’re good about looking for information on a number of websites. Believe me, we studied all sorts of MMA sites traffic data when we were launching this site. The average MMA fan online regularly visits at least a half dozen other sites for information, which is much higher than virtually any other major or minor sport.
And were that the case, why did it *only* manifest itself for UFC 103? Google search trends for UFC 100 and 101 were through the roof. We did a lot of analysis much like this for those events and the UFC simply dominated the online ‘buzz’ on both Google and Twitter. Search the blog for ‘UFC Google’ or ‘UFC Twitter’ and you can read what we said about those events–even if you drink Dana White’s Kool Aide the data pretty clearly demonstrates that there was much less interest online for UFC 103.
This isn’t a result of UFC.com being the only destination for information for MMA fans (its not, believe me–I know MMA web traffic demographics front and back). It’s not even a reflection of a lack of interest in their product overall, though I think they’re running an extreme risk of diluting their product by having too many PPV events instead of fewer events with stronger cards. In this case, however, there was much more interest outside of the ‘hardcore fan’ community of each sport on the Mayweather fight. It was a by product of his mainstream appeal, and a card that had little interest for casual MMA fans and the mainstream sports media.
Personally, I don’t think the data would have been much better for the UFC had the Mayweather fight not factored into the equation. For whatever reason, there just wasn’t a lot of interest in this card and/or the UFC didn’t promote it properly. That’s another risk of trying to have too many PPVs–you can’t do a good job hyping any of them. With the poor promotion effort locally for UFC 102 in Portland, the disappointing Youngstown, OH ticket sales that forced the relocation of the WEC event scheduled there (and if you believe the story that they couldn’t work around the ice motorcycle racing event they claimed was scheduled for the venue I’ve got some swampland in Florida you might be interested in) and a lack of buzz–and likely disappointing PPV buyrates–for UFC 103 it could be that Zuffa’s spreading themselves too thin.
September 22nd, 2009 at 5:44 pm
I was upset by how many of the fights on Saturday
were early stoppage!!!!!
they really have to do something about that
i tried to keep telling myself
“its ok” the belfort vs franklin fight will be great
just out of respect for Franklin.
But deep in my gut i knew he was finished
I love MMA but it will never be Boxing
eventually it may become more mainstream
if it isnt already
but would u rather pay ppv prices for a 12 round fight
or ppv prices for a 3 round fight…5 round championship…
UP TO THE BUYER I GUESS….
all i know is that i was ripped off Saturday
and probably will get ripped off during the shogun vs machida ppv
but im stupid enough to still order it
so why am i even doing this
HAVE NO CLUE LOL