The UFC’s new relationship with Paramount is off to a good start.
On Saturday night, UFC 324 served as the first event streaming on Paramount+ as part of the company’s new seven year, $7.7 billion deal with the David Ellison run network. For the first time, the UFC did away with pay-per-view and instead made every card available for subscribers on Paramount+, which included the UFC 324 card headlined by Justin Gaethje’s unanimous decision win over Paddy Pimblett to claim the interim lightweight title.
UFC 324 ultimately delivered with 4.96 million average viewers and over 7 million total households for the main card. The show taking place at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas also accounted for 5.93 million concurrent streams at its peak.
According to Paramount, that is the streaming platform’s largest exclusive live event to date.
Paramount also touted UFC 324 reaching “more homes than any other live UFC event in nearly a decade across linear, broadcast and streaming,” per data from Adobe Analytics and Nielsen Media.
That’s all good news for the UFC as the promotion kicked off the new partnership with Paramount after spending the past seven years on the ESPN family of networks.
After negotiating with several potential broadcast partners including a near deal with Netflix, the UFC ultimately opted to sign with Paramount after reaching an agreement on the seven year, $7.7 billion deal to bring all programming to the network and completely doing away with the pay-per-view format for the biggest events.
On the heels of the success of UFC 324 this past weekend, UFC 325 is now scheduled for Saturday with featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski defending his title against Diego Lopes in a rematch in the main event.
That main card kicks off at the same time — 9 p.m. ET/ 6 p.m. PT — with the card taking place in Sydney, Australia.
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