This is rather surprising: trending estimates for UFC 98 indicate that the show will do somewhere around 635,000 pay per view buys. That number has to be considered an unqualified success, especially considering that it was headlined by Lyoto Machida and Rashad Evans. The company did a fantastic job of building up Machida as a mystic karate master, but I’m not even sure the Countdown special could have led to a buyrate that high. The light heavyweight division is the marquee class in the company, but that still doesn’t account for the number being so high.
Matt Serra and Matt Hughes probably accounted for a large portion of that buyrate, but even the grudge match doesn’t explain the number being that high. The only logical explanation, at least to me, is that the UFC is hotter than ever. The baseline number of pay per views they’re going to sell is rising, and it’s only going to get bigger with UFC 100 just around the corner.
