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FIGHT! Magazine and MMAFighting.com (AOL) enter business partnership
By Zach Arnold | June 22, 2010
Here’s the initial press release. Here is more details about the deal from the latest edition of Pro MMA Radio:
LARRY PEPE: “Donovan, before I let you get out of here, I did have a press release here that Fight! struck a deal with AOL. Talk about that and what it’ll mean for Fight! Magazine and the company going forward. What’s that all about?”
DONOVAN CRAIG: “Well, one of the things, you know, we felt like with Fight! the magazine came out we really sort of raised the bar in terms of quality and what people expected from magazines in the Mixed Martial Arts space and when we started when we had some success with that we started branching out in other forms of media doing more and more things and we were looking around at places we thought we could do the same thing where we could move the bar and really make an impact, you know, both in terms of the business but also in terms of you know the quality, the content that was being brought to fans because we all really love the sport and we want to present it the best way possible. One of the places we saw that was in online video. We saw there was a lot of it on the web but there wasn’t a lot of it that was very good or well-produced, we didn’t think, so we over the last several months we’ve been building a very robust sort of production capability to produce really high quality innovative online videos from everything from lifestyle to interviews to you know training videos to you know event coverage, you name it. And we were distributing that to a series of partnerships with larger companies and the first one to be announced is with AOL which it will be through their MMAFighting.com which is their MMA version of Fanhouse which is AOL Sports franchise. It’s one of the biggest things on the web so, we’re extremely excited about it. It’s a huge deal and we think it’s going to help basically take what we’ve done with the magazine over the last three years and extend it out to another area.”
LARRY PEPE: “So, will the videos only be available at MMAFighting.com or will they be available at FightMagazine.com?”
DONOVAN CRAIG: “They’ll be available at FightMagazine.com as well so both of them will be released in a tandem at MMAFighting.com.”
Topics: Media, MMA, Zach Arnold | 21 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
An honest question: does anyone read mmafighting.com articles? I’m under the impression that people only go there for the interviews with Ariel Helwani.
Anyone who is into Japanese MMA should read MMAFighting. Daniel Herbertson’s articles and interviews are, together with the news reporting from Nightmare of Battle, the best resources in English for JMMA.
Thanks for writing, Daniel.
I have the website linked on my browser. But not to the home page but to the videos page. So to answer your question…. I don’t read the articles.
And who reads magazines anymore?
Herbertson is definitely the appeal.
This changes everything.
Fight Magazine is the MMA magazine in the world, well i dont read Kamipro and Gong ever, but i think on the american market, Fight has everything, even they sell more than the UFC Mag.
Sepaking about the UFC Mag, relly, is shit. And not for being an UFC hater, UFC mag have zero info.
What music has in his ipod Tyson Griffin, the Car Thiago Silva drives on Brasil, Portuguese words in english, damm all the sections are full shi////.
Zach, here is a funny leaked transcript between Chael Sonnen and one of the Fight! feature writers, I think you might get a kick out of it:
http://www.mixedmartialarts.com/mma.cfm?go=forum_framed.posts&forum=1&thread=1660461&page=1&pc=81
Unrelated, but newsworthy… And I think the big story of the last week is the ratings. According to MMAJunkie, here are the averages….
UFC Ultimate Fighter Finale 11 – 2 Million
Strikeforce: Los Angeles – 164,000
WEC 49: Edmonton – 244,000
Bellator 23 – Who knows, but they have never released true numbers so they can’t be very good.
There were a lot of good fights. 4 events in 5 days. And basically nobody watched them. The Strikeforce and WEC ratings are very low. The fact that neither could even hit the 250,000 mark is embarrassing. 2 Million for a TUF Finale seems low. It surely isn’t the best they have done for a TUF finale.
The MMA casual fans are still coming for the big events. If the UFC puts on a Lesnar or GSP card, it’s big business. But the smaller shows on TV in MMA are absolutely feeling the effects of this oversaturation.
Some people will try to play it off that Strikeforce was on a Wednesday and yada yada yada. The UFC has done shows on Wednesday’s before and been successful. It’s no excuse. And the WEC is just underpeforming. Sure it was a bad main event, but to not even pull in an average of 250,000 is pathetic.
It’s time to go back to the old saying…. Less is more….
Anytime you schedule a program on a new night in a different timeslot, there will be volatility in the ratings. UFC has run plenty of shows on Wednesday, but this was the first for Strikeforce and Showtime. I’d bet they expected a rating below their typical 300k baseline. And considering this was all conceived as a live event to piggyback onto E3 and the EA MMA game reveal, I don’t think anyone will be stressing over the rating. But it is kind of a shame that one of their most entertaining cards ended up being the least-watched of all the non-Challengers shows.
For WEC, they must have had to expect a dismal rating considering how little effort was put into promoting that event. It was a stopgap card with no star power and no real excitement generated among the hardcore fans. Like with SF:LA, the real downer is that so few people watched what was a very compelling event.
The rating for the TUF11 Finale is actually pretty decent, considering what a mediocre card they put together. Sure, it only had about half the viewership of The Kimbo Slice Show Finale, and failed to match even the average viewership of the TUF 9 Finale, but considering it had no splashy feature fight like Sanchez vs. Guida or Kimbo vs. Houston, they did fine.
“Some people will try to play it off that Strikeforce was on a Wednesday and yada yada yada. The UFC has done shows on Wednesday’s before and been successful. It’s no excuse.”
I don’t think it was a particularly strong/good show and I’m not trying to defend it, but didn’t the Strikeforce show on Wednesday night not even start until 11pm EST? If that’s right then I’m sorry but comparing ratings for a show that starts at 9pm EST vs. 11pm EST is pretty useless.
That right there is likely a BIG reason the ratings were below their usual 300k (besides the shorter, weaker card).
A recent Challenger show did nearly 300,000 and that was on at 11pm.
Plain and simple, both the WEC and SF shows tanked in that ratings.
Touche, good catch. Didn’t realize that…if so that’s a total dud.
There’s a big difference between staying up to 1AM on a Saturday and doing the same on a Wednesday. And that one Challengers show averaged over 300k viewers during a free preview weekend.
Somewhere else on the internet, I made the statement that if you took all the main events of all the shows from last week and combined them, I would be hardpressed to care. I ended up watching the Strikeforce (help justify Showtime subscription?) and saw the final on the Bellator show…but the rest? Didn’t bother.
A couple years ago we were getting Henderson/Rampage for free on Spike. Now? Its been about 8 months since there was a free numbered UFC on TV. Looks like we’ll get one for the year along with a bunch of half-assed free shows. Add in tons of PPVs (where all the relevant fights are) and you’re not encouraging anyone to watch anything but big fights.
Matt Hamill vs. Keith Jardine is easily one of the weakest free tv main events I can remember in quite some time. The show still did a decent rating and it was sandwiched between about 5 shows this month so I understand they’re spread a little thin, but “less is more” is certainly right.
It seemed to me someone in the booking figured out it was a pretty worthless main event in the weeks leading up to the fight, so they made it the co-main event instead of the main event.
It’s the first TUF finale I remember that had the finals as the “main event”.
WEC needs to become part of the UFC. I have no idea what Dana and the Fertittas are thinking trying to keep the brands separate. It is bizarre and stupid.
Well not really, Versus are paying for a decent product and the UFC’s deal with Spike only allows them 4 live shows per year on another network.
The top WEC guys also wanted a potential PPV% and that has cost Versus maybe two shows this year as well.
They could make WEC a B level feeder promotion but would Versus really want to pay for that? at least right now they can rightly claim they have the best lighter weight fighters on the planet.
Agreed.
I just think they need to out and out get rid of the LW division there. Bring over the fighters you’re gonna keep to the UFC, maybe create a WEC vs. UFC type card where you have fights like- Henderson vs. Dunham, Shalorus vs. Tibau, Cerrone vs. Siver, Pettis vs. Guida etc… etc.
Eventhough the OWs in the WEC put on great fights they just are in kind of a no man’s land IMO.
OWs-LWs… I gotta start looking over my posts.