With the tradition of one of the oldest professional MMA tournaments in the world, UFC always maintains a large number of followers. However, UFC audiences do not have many conditions to watch the tournament through social networking platforms. This is different from One Championship.
In a recent statistics on the number of viewers on social networking platforms, Nielsen (a unit specializing in data and economic analysis) shows that ONE Championship has twice the number of viewers. More specifically, One Championship has a number of viewers on social networks of 406 million. The number of UFC is only 259 million.
Considering in all sports, the number of ONE Championship viewers behind NBA, even higher than the UEFA Champions League and many other professional sports tournaments. The two sports tournaments with the largest viewer over the past time are the Tokyo and Euro 2021 Olympic Games, which are not frequent events every year.
In fact, this information is for reference only. Because, at the present time, One still maintains live broadcast free of many major events. As for UFC, NBA or other tournaments, viewers must spend money to monitor. The fee for tracking some UFC's belt matches is about 70 USD in North America.
But from a certain angle, the potential of One Championship is undeniable. Southeast Asia market is very “crazy” of martial arts and has 600 million people, and the purchasing power is increasing in the near future. Therefore, ONE Championship is still considered a major counterweight of UFC in the future, based on the potential they own.