(Photo courtesy of Combat Lifestyle.)
Affliction VP Tom Atencio is once again claiming that his organization sold more than 100,000 pay-per-views for their first event, and he doesn’t care what you heard. Atencio told MMA Weekly recently that they did “well over 100,000″ — a phrase that’s becoming all too familiar — but that he isn’t planning on proving it by releasing the official numbers. And why not?
“It’s been my experience that the UFC doesn’t release their numbers, and I try to learn from other companies with mistakes and what they’re doing right,” Atencio said.
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“We did well over 100,000,” Atencio said. “At this point, we did well over, but I don’t want to give the exact numbers.”
Last week Dave Meltzer estimated the number of pay-per-views sold as being somewhere between 50-85,000, though it wasn’t exactly clear where he was getting that figure from. Now Atencio is basically asking us all to take his word for it and trust that he’s telling the truth. We’d like to, but ever since we dated that vaguely European girl in college we’ve had some real trust issues.
As for what kind of split Affliction worked out with their PPV distributor, Atencio has some more vague non-answers. 50-50 would be a great split, along the lines of what the UFC is thought to be getting these days, though 60-40 (in favor of the distributor) would be more likely. On that front, Atencio isn’t giving anything away:
“That wasn’t our deal,” Atencio said. “But we had a pretty standard - we actually may have done better than that. We don’t go into anything completely blind, and we had a general idea of what we were looking for, and we did a good job.”
May have done better? That’s not exactly reassuring from the Vice President. Especially not after he’s asking us to take him on pure faith.