Early Buyrate for UFC 67

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Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter has reported an early estimate of the UFC 67 pay-per-view buyrate. Headlined by Anderson Silva vs. Travis Lutter in what turned out to be a non-title match, the show did somewhere between 350,000 to 400,000 buys. The final number won’t be in for at least another month, but this is at the same pace of last year’s Super Bowl Saturday show (Liddell vs. Couture, the biggest UFC fight in history to that point), and higher than the 338,000 North American buys last year’s WWE Royal Rumble did.

It appears this is on the low end of what UFC PPVs will do in 2007, with Meltzer projecting UFC 68 (Couture vs. Sylvia) to do at least 700,000 buys, likely beating once-dominant Wrestlemania in North America.

The top boxing, MMA and pro wrestling PPVs of 2006 domestically were:

1. Tito Ortiz vs. Chuck Liddell — 1,050,000
2. Oscar de la Hoya vs. Ricardo Mayorga — 925,000
3. Tito Ortiz vs. Ken Shamrock — 775,000
4. Wrestlemania (Cena vs. HHH, Mysterio vs. Angle vs. Orton) — 636,000
5. Royce Gracie vs. Matt Hughes — 620,000

This was of course the huge story of 2006, and will be something worth watching this year and beyond, especially with seemingly so many more MMA players promoting shows. On that note, Showtime’s EXC and San Jose-based Strike Force are looking to promote a PPV in the near future based around Frank Shamrock. The Showtime debut of EXC drew 365,000 viewers for the premium network — at the level of its highest-rated shows — and was the biggest show in history for Canada’s The Fight Network, according to Meltzer.

Matthew Michaels is one of the original editors of Pulse Wrestling, and was founding editor of Inside Fights and of Inside Pulse Music.