We’re still waiting for the official ratings numbers from Paramount+ on how huge the UFC White House event was, but Joe Rogan is sharing the numbers he’s heard, and they’re pretty damn huge.
To put things in perspective, UFC 324 was streamed in 7.18 million households. Netflix announced that their Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano event averaged 12.4 million viewers with a 17 million viewer peak for the main event. The Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight averaged 108 million viewers. Now Rogan is claiming that the UFC White House event was viewed 150 million times on Sunday and Monday.
After weeks of being a bit of a negative Nancy over the outdoor setup, Rogan gushed about how amazing the whole event was.
“I’m a hyperbolic individual and I’m always like, ‘This is the greatest! This is awesome!’” he admitted on the latest episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. “Like, that was the wildest experience that I’ve ever had in my twenty whatever years of calling combat sports. There’s nothing even close. Nothing even close. It was the greatest night of fights of all time. And it was the only night in the history of the sport where every single fight ended by knockout.”
“Back then, it was like you were doing porn or something, or snuff films,” he said. “So you were doing something that was damaging for your career. And people would look at you like, ‘Why are you working for a cage fighting organization? Why would you do that? Cut to twenty five years later, it’s on the lawn of the White House and it is one of the most watched sporting events in the history of the world.”
Rogan didn’t say who he got Paramount+ ratings numbers from, but we already know from UFC CEO Dana White that Paramount+ executive David Ellison was very happy with them. If they’re anywhere near Rogan’s numbers, we can see why.
“I don’t know what the total overall views are as of now,” Rogan noted. “But I know that it was well over, I think it was 150 million just by Monday. Just by Monday. So that’s the night of and then people that watched the replay that weren’t there when the fight took place because they heard about it. But now … between then and now, now we’re dealing with Tuesday. Like, it’s probably another 50 or 60 million people who have watched it.”
That’s quite the accomplishment considering Paramount+ currently has around 80 million subscribers worldwide. If everyone with a subscription watched the event once, and they estimated that at least 2 people per stream watched, you’d start getting to Rogan’s numbers. With the event cut up into individual fights, are they counting each video watched? Are they counting viewers on non-Paramount+ broadcast partners internationally? That could pump the numbers up.
Suffice to say, we’re looking for a slightly more reliable breakdown of the numbers from an official source before crowning UFC White House as the most watched MMA event in the history of the sport. But if it’s anywhere even close to what Joe’s saying, the event was a massive success for the UFC.
