MMA Newstand

Rampage strikes the Iceman pose

Monte Cox: I want to be Strikeforce

Monte Cox recently sat down with Bob Carson and discussed at length Adrenaline MMA and his business plan for the promotion. His main goals were crystallized in this quote:

I want to be Strikeforce. That is a show I can aspire to be. I'd like to be able to have one big fight like a Cung Le and Shamrock and a solid undercard. I want a little bit from TV and a good gate to make it.

While the UFC is facing opposition on a national level from the likes of EliteXC, there are opportunities at the super-regional level for other promotions to become profitable niche players. Strikeforce in Northern California, Matt Lindland's Sportfight promotion in the Northwest, and Monte Cox's Adrenaline with his Midwest (Chicago and Quad-Cities)connections are prime examples as well as the IFL increasingly becoming an East Coast, and Northeastern in particular, promotion.


The interview also gave some insight into the salary structure of Adrenaline MMA and, indirectly, Affliction. Monte spoke at length about Ben Rothwell's contracts with the IFL, Adrenaline and Affliction. Rothwell received $30,000 for his last few fights in the IFL. Monte then signed him to an Adrenaline contract at $200,000 per fight. Affliction acquired Ben's services and, though he didn't give a figure, he stated Ben was doing even better with Affliction, (presumably in the $250,000 to $300,000 range.)

Jay Larkin speaks with Multichannel News

IFL Execs shown the door

According to Carson's Corner, it was announced at the 5/16 IFL Mohegan Sun show that Keith Evans, IFL VP of Operations, and Lisa Faircloth, IFL Director of Events, have been let go by the company. Evans and Faircloth had been with the IFL since its' inception. Evans and Faircloth were both former Zuffa employees, with Evans being at the center of a lawsuit between Zuffa and the IFL. Zuffa claimed Evans took trade secrets with him when joining the IFL. The two were head-quartered out of the IFL Las Vegas office, which will probably also be eliminated by virtue of the IFL's seeming decision to no longer work the Vegas area as a market.

HDNet Fights CEO reaffirms Promotional Intent

HDNet Fights CEO Andrew Simon recently spoke with MMAWeekly, and stated that HDNet Fights is still in the event promotion business:

"We're going to be pretty opportunistic when we want to promote ourselves. We're in a little bit of a different position than everyone else. We have our own television network. We have our own arena in Dallas with the American Airlines Center, and we're not into it to just put on fights every month ourselves just because. I think you're going to see when we come back it will be a pretty big fight."

There was some speculation about HDNet Fights' future role as a promoter of events. The company has two cards under it's belt, the last being the December card that featured HDNet Fights contracted fighters Frank Trigg and Jason "Mayhem" Miller.

Fight! Magazine: Jens Pulver

Interesting choice of a cover for this month's Fight! Magazine. MMA makes its debut on one of the Big 4 networks and we get a cover emphasizing a lightweight battle on cable. You have to ask if Access being tied to coverage - ala the UFC's negotiations wit ESPN over MMA Live - lead to these kinds of choices?

Dream: Moves in the US Market

Japanese Promotion Dream has made news recently with several moves to shore up one of their secondary Markets, namely the United States. Dream announced a partnership with HDNet to air the first six installments of Dream on the high definition network. Dream and HDNet began their relationship with the New Year's Yarennoka card, or Fedor Returns as it was marketed here in the states. HDNEt is most likely paying a license fee for each installment of Dream, but not nearly the $1 to 1.5 million they paid for the Yarennoka card, as rumored by Dave Meltzer.

This relationship marks a new path of distribution for the hybrid promotion that combines remnants of the old Pride and Hero's organizations. FEG/K-1 never made any efforts to market their MMA promotion, Hero's, in the states and relied upon time buys on ESPN to promote their global Kickboxing brand in the US. Pride had much more aggressive marketing efforts in the US. Pride's main means of promotion in the US were through their semi-regular slot on FSN and on PPV. Pride went so far as to open up a domestic office and put on two US based cards before selling out to Zuffa. None of these avenues were able to raise Pride above a niche player in the US MMA market.

This new television path may be the most economical and effective one for Dream. With Dream still looking to get solid footing on Japanese broadcast tv, expending funds for a US timebuy would seem to be fool hardy. PPV was also an option but was generally not much of a money maker for Pride, even when they were at their strongest . Most Pride shows did in the neighborhood of 25k to 35k buys, so with their probable 60% take of the 34.95 list price of their PPV they were making around $600k to $700k a show on ppv before you factor in the costs of the ppv like their US Staff, satellite time, etc. The US shows weren't a significant revenue stream for Pride but instead were supported by the Huge Box office they were able to generate in their home market of Japan. As was the case for the IFL when they were on MyNetwork, their cost of television was probably higher than the licensing fees it received for the events, which is detrimental to the bottom line. The HDNet is giving them a solid revenue stream through licensing fees and visibility in the US market without a labor or resource intensive structure.

With Dream announcing a strategic partnership with EliteXC, this calls into question the future relationship between Dream and HDNet. Dream and Elite announced that they would continue with talent exchanges between their rosters and also co-promote fight cards with the other in their respective home markets. A natural extension of this relationship would be possible Dream cards moving over to Elite's cable home on Showtime. Dream's future television home in the US could come down to dollars and cents, depending upon which American partner can come up with the higher license fee.

Kelly Perdew, ProElite.com president, resigns

Kelly Perdew, winner of season 2 of The Apprentice and President of ProElite.com, has submitted his resignation to take effect May 20. Perdew's resignation would seem to be a case of the other shoe dropping. A summary reading of ProElite Inc.'s 10-k gave clear evidence that the online portion of the company was a significant drain on funds, costing approx $3.3 million to operate but generating only $68k in revenue in 2007. ProElite.com would seem to being going through a major restructuring, with the seeming dormancy of Lead Blogger Sam Caplan, and the launching of a new streaming content feature to compete with UFC on Demand.

Quote of the Day: Roy Englebrecht

"Too many beginning promoters want to be like Bob Arum. They want to be like Don King. They think, 'I've got to get a name fighter,'....“They spend way too much on fighters, more than they have to."

--Promoter Roy Englebrecht, Co-Promoter of Affliction: Banned, espousing his views on why a lot of beginning promoters lose money.

Mr Englebrecht, Chancellor over at the Fight Promoter University, has generally made his name in combat promoting by preaching the principles of starting small, working within a budget, and generating small but positive cash flow event after event. These maxims for promoting success seem to be an anathema to the Affliction game plan, which seems to be big names and an even bigger budget. The fight business makes for strange bedfellows.

Toquinho

Lightweight rankings after GP Rd 2

from FightMatrix.com


1 Shinya Aoki
Last Fight: 4/29/2008 [DREAM] 15-2-0

2 Takanori Gomi
Last Fight: 3/5/2008 [WVR] 28-3-0

3 B.J. Penn
Last Fight: 1/19/2008 [UFC] 12-4-1

4 Sean Sherk
Last Fight: 7/7/2007 [UFC] 32-2-1

5 Gesias Calvancante
Last Fight: 4/29/2008 [DREAM] 14-2-1

6 Kenny Florian
Last Fight: 4/2/2008 [UFC] 9-3-0

7 Tatsuya Kawajiri
Last Fight: 5/11/2008 [DREAM] 22-4-2

8 Caol Uno
Last Fight: 5/11/2008 [DREAM] 25-10-4

9 Eddie Alvarez
Last Fight: 5/11/2008 [DREAM] 14-1-0

10 Roger Huerta
Last Fight: 12/8/2007 [UFC] 20-1-1

11 Mitsuhiro Ishida
Last Fight: 5/11/2008 [DREAM] 17-4-1

12 Gilbert Melendez
Last Fight: 3/29/2008 [Strike Force] 14-1-0

13 Marcus Aurelio
Last Fight: 4/2/2008 [UFC] 16-5-0

14 Tyson Griffin
Last Fight: 2/2/2008 [UFC] 11-1-0

15 Vitor Ribeiro
Last Fight: 9/17/2007 [K-1] 19-2-0

16 Hermes Franca
Last Fight: 7/7/2007 [UFC] 18-6-0

17 Gray Maynard
Last Fight: 4/2/2008 [UFC] 5-0-0

18 Joe Stevenson
Last Fight: 1/19/2008 [UFC] 30-8-0

19 Takashi Nakakura
Last Fight: 5/3/2008 [Shooto] 10-2-1

20 Clay Guida
Last Fight: 4/2/2008 [UFC] 23-9-0

Which T-shirt is more detrimental?

Affliction usually gets a lot of grief from the folks with a "MMA...this is serious business" mindset but ask your self this:

Which of these t-shirts is more detrimental to the image of mma?



or

hl central

You can't make it on your own

As news trickles out about the Affliction and HDNet collaboration being on the outs, it continues to boggle the mind that each of these players in the Non-UFC MMA world still think they can do it own their own. EliteXC, The Affliction Group, and HDNet Fights seem to lack the awareness of the huge mountain they have to climb in order to be a viable competitor to the UFC.

Each group has their own unique strengths but is lacking in the ability to monetize those strengths. Take EliteXC for example. They have corporate backing and a slot on prime time tv but little in the means of monetizing that prime real estate. They are puttin on a show in prime time, that will generate main stream viewership that leads to no $$$ in the end.

Affliction has a nice stable of guys and is seemingly going to put their show on PPV but they lack the ability get mainstream exposure to hype the show, which will end up dooming the show to failure and be lucky to get 50k PPV buys. That kind of buy rate will mean Affliction will get WFA'd, dead in the water after one card...buried by a monster pay roll.

HDNet's has the facilities and the Hype man to sell the Fight(Cuban) but their TV channel lacks the coverage to be an effective promotional tool.

These guys need to pool their resources to try and mount a run at the UFC that would resemble anything successful. Instead of having two unrelated cards a week apart, one on free network tv and the other on PPV, work together for your mutual benefit.

Here is what their gameplan should look like.....

Have the card hosted in Dallas by Cuban in the American Airlines Centre. This is an area where you can cut cost, not having to pay to rent the arena. In exchange for the gratis arena, HDNet get to air the show a week after the PPV.

Do a Countdown to Fedor vs Sylvia barker show that could air each week in the month leading up the PPV. This show could air on both Showtime and HDNet to drive folks to the PPV.

Have the CBS show air a week before the PPV card in Dallas. Have the PPV show hyped on the CBS card. In exchange for the major promotion the PPV would get have the PPV televised through Showtime's PPV arm. Have Affliction and HDNet named as major sponsors for the CBS show with appropriate signage, giving both brands major network exposure.

Take someone like Josh Barnett off of the PPV show and give him a soft touch on the CBS show....this allows him to call out the winner of the upcoming Sylvia-Fedor match and automatically set's up your next CBS-PPV cycle.

Use the week in between the two shows to leverage the CBS ties in order to hype up the show.... put the two on Craig Ferguson and Letterman to generate interest.... Hell, try to work in Jimmy Kimmel at ABC, as Elite XC has used him in the past with kimbo tank and shamrock. Have cuban use his relationships with the Folks at ESPN to promote the show.. Have him go on JIm Rome, PTI etc to hype up the fight.

Have HDNet show the Prelims leading up the the PPV card. Have Barnett fresh off his win a week earlier at the show ready to challenge the winner during the PPV telecast, generating interest for your next PPV show.

Have Showtime and HDnet air the show a week after the PPV card.

wash rinse and repeat..... next time around you dod the same thing. Have arlovski on the cbs show challenging the winner of a Fedor vs Barnett match-up.

In the end everybody got something out of the equation. HDNet and Affliction got their brands over, Elite gets to monetize their CBS show into PPV $$$. Showtime and HDnet get some after market programming. The fighter got paid and got exposure on network TV.


Will this kind of set-up ensure success? No, but it having it Properly Promoted will maximize the possibility of it being successful. If it fails, the by pooling your resources you have limited your exposure and one company isn't being engulfed by the losses.