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Fox Sports: "Zach Arnold's Fight Opinion site is one of the best spots on the Web for thought-provoking MMA pieces."

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The Echo Chamber

By Zach Arnold | October 23, 2006

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By Zach Arnold

I realize that by writing this article, it is going to draw significant heat with a lot of PRIDE fans. I accept that premise going into this. However, this article has to be written because a few things need to be pointed out about PRIDE’s Las Vegas event that haven’t been mentioned online.

Update: Nikkan Sports has an article which quotes PRIDE management as hinting that they are in negotiations to get a TV deal for their New Year’s Eve show. Sakakibara is claiming that he is talking with “two or more TV stations.” He claims a conclusive answer will be issued on November 10th.

One of the things about Fight Opinion that makes it a unique site is that about half of the articles cover the Japanese fight scene. My roots in covering the Japanese fight scene (primarily with professional wrestling) started in the 1990s. This was the Golden Era of professional wrestling in Japan, a time when MMA was barely starting. UWF-International, labeled professional wrestling, was the closest thing to MMA (along with the smaller Pancrase). In 1995, New Japan Pro Wrestling, Japan’s largest professional wrestling company, killed off UWF-International (which was led by Nobuhiko Takada). The feud was a result of a failed political campaign by Takada that lost significant money. Only Takada came out of the interpromotional war unscathed.

Rising from the death of UWF-International was PRIDE. I watched their very first show, promoted under the KRS banner. I understood why Takada vs. Rickson Gracie was such a big program. I appreciate history a lot, so reminiscing about older memories of the Japanese fight scene is a pleasant experience. It may be the same for you, too. You may know the Japanese language or like anime, or just like Japanese culture in general. Because we may share similar interests or at least common bonds with being a fan of the Japanese fight scene, we often hang out on the Internet in a virtual echo chamber. A segmented world online in which those who like the Japanese fight scene hang out on a few sites, but not on the mainstream areas. There is the Internet. There are communities. There is the fight game. There is MMA. There is Japan. And then there are the various groups (PRIDE, K-1, etc.) and the fans of them.

When you look at the segmentation that occurs online as far as audiences for different sites, you can understand clearly why PRIDE or K-1, which draw big business in Japan, do not get talked about in larger circles. It’s a foreign product. It’s a product in a different language. There are different promoting values. There is a different mindset. There are other factors that should be talked about but usually aren’t (such as organized crime). It’s a different world.

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that PRIDE’s first show in Las Vegas did not draw the media attention that many in the Japanese fight community online thought it would. PRIDE is a Japanese product with roots in professional wrestling. Roots in the Japanese language. Roots in scandals. It’s so vastly different than what UFC or any other fight promotion represents.

The mistake that PRIDE fans make in assuming that PRIDE will automatically get over with foreign audiences is that because something is different than the current standard (UFC), it will automatically be popular.

That simply isn’t the case. And it never will be.

PRIDE drew 11,727 at the Thomas & Mack Center on October 21st, powered by Ed Fishman’s casino money and connections. Las Vegas is the right destination for them, considering the image that Vegas has with the Japanese as the entertainment capital of the world. Gambling money is also similar to what the Japanese know and understand with pachinko (and of course, from there, there is that “y” word that can always be mentioned when talking about Japanese gaming).

The crowd that showed up for PRIDE is not a typical mainstream fight crowd. It was a crowd that, rudely put, was dominated by PRIDE otakus. The hardest of the hardcore fans. The type of fans that would travel from other destinations to go see PRIDE live.

Unquestionably, PRIDE did financially better on the 10/21 show than most prognosticators would have expected. The question that has to be asked, however, is this: Are the same fans who went to Las Vegas from Kansas, South Carolina, Alabama, New York, Canada, and Japan going to go consistently to future PRIDE shows in America?

The answer is likely no. And this presents a future problem for the company. PRIDE faces the daunting challenge of making new fans while in the process catering to hardcore fans to stay financially stable. One of the keys to creating new fans is attracting mainstream media attention. Another is by having a weekly or monthly television show that attracts a lot of eyeballs. A third method is a heavy advertising campaign.

In regards to PRIDE’s US television deal, they are on Fox Sports Net. Fox Sports Net does not garner the same attention as a network like ESPN or Spike TV does.

In regards to a heavy advertising campaign, PRIDE may have paid for billboards in Los Angeles and other cities. However, billboard advertising is an “all show and no go” proposition as far as trying to promote a product that is being displayed in another city. There were not many ads for the PRIDE event on national American television. If you didn’t have the Internet and weren’t an MMA fan with a peripheral view about what PRIDE was, you didn’t know that they had a show in Las Vegas on October 21st.

Then there is the issue of mainstream media attention. One of the brilliant tactics that Dana White & UFC have employed is working with the various boxing and fight writers in all the national newspapers and media outlets in Canada and America. Every single UFC show attracts writers from the Miami Herald, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the Long Beach-Press Telegram, and sometimes the LA Times. Plus Neil Davidson from the Canadian Press. These are blue-chip media outlets that have a large reach. It’s an amazing scope of mainstream coverage.

For PRIDE’s October 21st show, the show did not attract much, if any, mainstream media coverage at all. You had the usual contingent of Japanese writers that go to every Japanese show in foreign countries (i.e. K-1 events). You had the local Las Vegas beat writers (Jeff Haney and Kevin Iole). And you had the hardcore MMA web sites (like Sherdog). However, nobody from major national blue-chip media outlets covered the PRIDE event. Not having a large scale of media coverage makes it very difficult to attract and create new fans.

For those of us who know what PRIDE is, know their fighters, and know their schedule, Saturday’s show was considered a “big event.” However, for the average American at home that is a casual Internet user and watches television, they had no idea that PRIDE had a show. Without mainstream media coverage, very few knew about PRIDE’s debut in the United States.

Outside of the mainstream media, there are the blogs. The Internet media. Outside of the hardcore MMA sites, the big question would be whether or not the PRIDE show would attract the attention of your casual MMA fans online. There is a difference between people who show up to read Fight Opinion and someone who blogs about Chuck Liddell on their MySpace account. One of the best ways to determine what kind of interest there is from a casual online audience about a topic is to go to Technorati.com, which indexes over 55 million blogs online. These include MySpace, LiveJournal, BlogSpot, WordPress, and B2Evolution sites. Everything and anything in between.

Usually when you go on Technorati before and after a UFC event, you can see that there is a buzz generated by the promotion with casual fans. Type in UFC before an upcoming event and you will definitely see the impact. So before and after the PRIDE Las Vegas show, I decided to do several searches for PRIDE (in combination with other key words such as Vegas) to see what kind of casual attention the PRIDE event was drawing. The answer? Outside of our site (which is indexed on Technorati), there were only maybe 7-10 entries on the entire indexing system in relation to the PRIDE Las Vegas event. Compare that with the hundreds, if not a couple of thousand entries that UFC gets after each big show, and the contrast/comparison could not be any more dramatic.

The largest issue for PRIDE is getting coverage from both the mainstream media and from the blogs. Once they get the media attention, the next step is trying to convert those fans into becoming PRIDE supporters.

If the debut show is a test case, then call it a minor failure.

Both Las Vegas beat writers, Jeff Haney and Kevin Iole, were less than impressed with the event. Both Haney and Iole are legitimate fight writers. They know the industries and the Vegas scene very well. They are not pushovers. Former Boston Globe writer and current FoxSports.com editor Dave Doyle called the PRIDE show a glorified “Superstars of Wrestling” taping. Neil Davidson played his coverage of the PRIDE event straight in the Canadian Press. Outside of those writers, that was it for mainstream media coverage. There was nobody else covering it on a significant level. If the blogs weren’t covering the show and the mainstream media wasn’t covering it, and those from the media that did cover it who were new to PRIDE and weren’t sold on the product, then there are some big issues that PRIDE has to address.

The echo chamber on the Internet for the PRIDE show is misleading. There are those who are diehard PRIDE fans and media writers who desparately want to see competition for UFC. Some of them have a financial stake in pushing PRIDE. In the case of the pro-wrestling media, they see PRIDE’s debut show as a chance to try to frame PRIDE and UFC into a similar war as the WWF & WCW had in the 1990s (the “Monday Night Wars.”) Of course, each of those shows drew 6 million viewers a week. UFC would kill to have 6 million viewers watching their product, and PRIDE would kill to have 60,000 PPV buys in the US. In actuality, the majority of casual male fight fans in America see a three-way competition between UFC & boxing & WWE. PRIDE doesn’t enter the equation, and it won’t unless things change dramatically.

A major issue that PRIDE has to deal with is this: What kind of audience do they want to attract? In the Japanese marketplace, they can afford and thrive on marketing to a hardcore audience. Japan is a small country (in comparison to America) with an interconnected transportation system. It’s easy to market a show in Japan and draw a respectable crowd. That’s not the case in America. America is a big country that is spread out. PRIDE may have a lot of hardcore fans, but those hardcore fans are spread out throughout the country. They can’t simply travel to every Las Vegas show. This poses a problem for PRIDE. Do they relegate themselves on being the Ring of Honor of MMA, or can they find ways to expand their audience on a larger scale?

Even if PRIDE decides to try to expand their audience on a larger scale, the question is will Americans accept the PRIDE product? Will they deem it too Japanese? Will they deem it as a wannabe UFC, even if PRIDE historically has had the better fighters? In the case of the Las Vegas beat writers, despite the high-level production values that PRIDE displayed at the Thomas & Mack Center, they were not sold on the event overall. Haney & Iole have seen big-level UFC & boxing events in the past. They weren’t burying PRIDE just to bury PRIDE. When you can’t win over writers with a large readership, it can be a problem.

It’s a lot easier to win over a small readership that finds itself in a virtual echo chamber.

There is an analogy to be made about PRIDE’s entry in the American market place that has not been raised online, yet. I will make that analogy on this week’s Fight Opinion Radio show, and I hope you join us this week in listening to our latest radio show. Please feel free to e-mail us any questions or comments that you would like us to discuss on the radio show by sending us an e-mail at [email protected].

Topics: All Topics, Media, MMA, PRIDE, Zach Arnold | 57 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |

57 Responses to “The Echo Chamber”

  1. pwedza says:

    Nevertheless, PRIDE is HUGE in Europe

  2. […] The biggest question, as Zach Arnold pointed out in his piece, is whether that show got over with any casual fans that might have been watching because to build on that attendance figure, they will need to start attracting more casual fans. The hardcore fan base is a good place to start from. UFC relied on their base for support for many years following the cable ban, and even after Zuffa put them back on PPV, but were still without national television. […]

  3. […] Right after we taped our newest show (reviewing the PRIDE Las Vegas event), news broke that both Vitor Belfort and Pawel Nastula failed their drug tests (issued by the NSAC). We’ll have a lot more on this story on next week’s show. On this week’s show, we discuss the fallout from PRIDE’s LV event (what the future of the company is, what the company is attempting to do that no other major fighting league has ever accomplished, reaction to The Echo Chamber article). Also, we have a news-of-the-world segment previewing the dream match that everyone has wanted to see, Mike Tyson vs. Tom Jones. Plus the world famous grab bag segment. A very entertaining show this week. […]

  4. […] MMA Critic: The vision of PRIDE supporters (this harkens back to The Echo Chamber article) […]

  5. […] ?breathtaking site now commentate this snippet http://www.fightopinion.com/2006/10/23/the-echo-chamber and give comments […]