A revolving carousel of fighters draws fan interest and buzz from month to month, depending on the marquee fights set to air. Brock Lesnar topped the rankings in July with his UFC 100 main event; Lesnar was then supplanted by Gina Carano’s Strikeforce megafight in August. Over the long term, however, a relatively small group of MMA stars consistently garners a disproportionate amount of MMA fan interest. There are 50 fighters collectively getting half of all attention paid to MMA fighters. They drive the sport, and the hundreds of other rank-and-file competitors each garner only a tiny fraction of attention. The top 50 are ranked below.
Brock Lesnar tops the list, single-handedly generating 3.5% of all interest in MMA. This is an impressive feat considering there are hundreds of fighters across the major organizations and he has only had one bout to date in 2009. The top free agent is Bobby Lashley, at an eyebrow-raising 4th place on the list. With rumors of Lashley potentially signing with Strikeforce, he could become a major draw for the promotion if his win streak continues.
33 of the top 50 fighters are currently signed to the UFC, with 9 others signed to Strikeforce. Of the 50 who made the list, 30 had their last fight in either the Heavyweight or Light Heavyweight division, illustrating how much fans are attracted to the bigger weight classes. Miguel Torres and Urijah Faber were the only fighters from their respective 135 and 145 pound weight classes to make the cut.
| Rank | Fighter | Share of Fan Interest |
Promotion |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Brock Lesnar | 3.5% | UFC |
| 2 | Fedor Emelianenko | 3.2% | Strikeforce |
| 3 | Anderson Silva | 2.2% | UFC |
| 4 | Bobby Lashley | 2.0% | Free Agent |
| 5 | Gina Carano | 2.0% | Strikeforce |
| 6 | Lyoto Machida | 2.0% | UFC |
| 7 | Kevin “Kimbo Slice” Ferguson | 1.7% | UFC |
| 8 | Chuck Liddell | 1.6% | UFC |
| 9 | Randy Couture | 1.4% | UFC |
| 10 | Forrest Griffin | 1.4% | UFC |
| 11 | Tito Ortiz | 1.3% | UFC |
| 12 | Shane Carwin | 1.1% | UFC |
| 13 | Dan Henderson | 1.1% | UFC |
| 14 | Frank Mir | 1.1% | UFC |
| 15 | Rashad Evans | 1.1% | UFC |
| 16 | Georges St. Pierre | 1.0% | UFC |
| 17 | Quinton “Rampage” Jackson | 1.0% | UFC |
| 18 | Ken Shamrock | 0.9% | Free Agent |
| 19 | Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira | 0.9% | UFC |
| 20 | Andrei Arlovski | 0.9% | Strikeforce |
| 21 | Cristiane “Cyborg” Santos | 0.8% | Strikeforce |
| 22 | Wanderlei Silva | 0.8% | UFC |
| 23 | BJ Penn | 0.8% | UFC |
| 24 | Thiago Alves | 0.8% | UFC |
| 25 | Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic | 0.8% | UFC |
| 26 | Josh Barnett | 0.8% | Free Agent |
| 27 | Tim Sylvia | 0.7% | Free Agent |
| 28 | Royce Gracie | 0.7% | Free Agent |
| 29 | Matt Hughes | 0.7% | UFC |
| 30 | Bob Sapp | 0.7% | Dream |
| 31 | Rich Franklin | 0.7% | UFC |
| 32 | Diego Sanchez | 0.7% | UFC |
| 33 | Vitor Belfort | 0.7% | UFC |
| 34 | Michael Bisping | 0.6% | UFC |
| 35 | Mauricio “Shogun” Rua | 0.6% | UFC |
| 36 | Nick Diaz | 0.6% | Strikeforce |
| 37 | Brett Rogers | 0.6% | Strikeforce |
| 38 | Urijah Faber | 0.6% | WEC |
| 39 | Mark Coleman | 0.6% | UFC |
| 40 | Keith Jardine | 0.6% | UFC |
| 41 | Cain Velasquez | 0.6% | UFC |
| 42 | Kenny Florian | 0.6% | UFC |
| 43 | Frank Shamrock | 0.5% | Strikeforce |
| 44 | Gegard Mousasi | 0.5% | Strikeforce |
| 45 | Jon Fitch | 0.5% | UFC |
| 46 | Brandon Vera | 0.5% | UFC |
| 47 | Clay Guida | 0.5% | UFC |
| 48 | Thiago Silva | 0.5% | UFC |
| 49 | Renato “Babalu “Sobral | 0.4% | Strikeforce |
| 50 | Miguel Torres | 0.4% | WEC |
| Total | 50.2% |
This list appears to have some major flaws in it. I don’t know what measure of association you’re using, or whatever statistics you’ve employed, but to say that Lashley has more drawing power than GSP is completely delusional, or should be used as a really good indicator that your methodology is flawed.
I also think you’re making an unjustified leap between the data you have and the draw each of these guys produce. Just because people are googling their names doesn’t mean they want to pay to see them fight. I will look up info on Sylvia just to keep up with his fall from grace, but I don’t really care to watch him fight.
Max Power: Where during the whole written piece does this say it represents the drawing power of a fighter for a PPV event? From how this is laid out i presumed this takes all figures, PPV ratings, but also just stuff like the amount of hits a website article on a fighter gets, it says MMA Interest after all, not the amount of money they can draw.
This too me is how i can understand Bobby Lashley being so high, personally i’ve read a lot of articles on him, following how his MMA career is going, and i presume a lot of WWE fans are doing the same, much like they did Lesnar, of course Lashley isn’t selling more PPV’s when he’s fighting Sapp in a small promotion compared to GSP headlining a UFC event, but, everyday people being interested in Lashley more so than GSP, and showing it by reading more articles, watching more interviews, etc, i can believe.
I think you are dumb. It uses language which seems rather clear and unambiguous that this is a list of fighters which “drive the sport” through their respective “draw[ing of] fan interest and buzz from month to month.” Perhaps I went too far when I qualified “draw” with “PPV” . . . Oh wait, I didn’t. You just assumed I said that, or just pretended I said it out of convenience for your response. Why would people go search out information on GSP? Most avid fans pretty much know most of what there is to know about the guy. Unless there is some recent development, it doesn’t make sense to compare an upcoming fighter’s searches with an established fighter’s searches because the established fighter is well known. Likewise, there are fewer articles written about GSP without some new event because there is less motivation than some new fighter.
It also seems odd that there aren’t huge discrepancies among percentages. It seems rather uniform, which doesn’t make much sense. Additionally, some fighter interest is purely contextual: people only started hearing about Carwin mostly when his fight with Lesnar was announced, how are we supposed to distinguish Carwin’s popularity with Lesnar’s popularity? We might be able to control for it using statistics before the fight was announced, but even those figures would be suspect since his fan base has surely grown. I think it would require a fair amount of pretty involved association tests and limitations to get any accurate numbers, and this list clearly hasn’t done that given the high proximity most of these fighters have.
@maxpower
thanks for your comments, you make some great points. the information above is not directly measuring drawing power. rather, it is fan interest in researching and learning about these athletes.
a lot of fan interest could, but won’t necessarily, translate into big drawing power. that said, we do think bobby lashley has a lot of potential from a marketing point of view.
MaxPower:
You don’t get it. It is nothing to do with drawing power of anyone. It is how much ‘attention’ they get over all forms of media. If you paid attention to the article, you would realize your flaw. Plus, your argument about people knowing about fighters already and tthem not getting as much press defeats your entire argument. If they don’t get the press, then how the hell would they get ranked?
Algorithmic buzz-tracking is very tricky… Lashley likely does benefit from the double fan-base, but you’ll also notice that this information seems to skew toward what’s being blogged about at the moment; Carwin’s an erroneous hit at 12, unless we consider things like his Cagepotato relationship, and the coverage his Lesnar smack talk is getting on pretty much a bi-weekly basis right now. Carano has the body issue, Fedor just got married, Kimbo’s the center of the new TUF season, Chuck is dancing with the stars, etc…
I’m curious exactly how this Compete Inc. report gets rolled up, but presumably this is some sort of search analytics– i’m guessing within that these percentages are out of the entire body of “mma fighter” queries you’re looking at? It seems weird their impacts would be so statistically insignificant if their tool is really suited to the task.
Anyway, this was an interesting read. Thanks for pulling together.
I’d be curious to see how much this landscape would have shaken down differently during the press storm for the GSP / BJ Penn tilt; if I had to venture a guess, I’d say this is a momentary snapshot of a more cyclical churn of fan interest, but I don’t really have anything on hand to back that up.
For that matter, I’d be curious if this looks at French, Japanese and Brazillian-Language sites, as there’s clearly also an international fan base, and there are significant MMA fighters whose followers may speak those languages primarily…
@LBo
Good comments. FYI this does not look at any foreign language site or activity. It represents activity from U.S. residents only, looking at English sites. Down the road if we are able to get some international stuff in here, we definitely will.
Other variant is possible also