LAS VEGAS -- UFC CEO Dana White is seated at a table in the executive dining room on the UFC campus, quietly eating lunch. He is listening intently as Power Slap president Frank Lamicella is rattling off a mind-numbing list of social media numbers:
• Power Slap has six of the Top 10 YouTube shorts of all-time, accounting for 560 million views. The UFC's six best YouTube shorts include five Power Slap videos, which total over 510 million additional views. Combined, there are over 1.07 billion views of those on a planet inhabited by 8 billion humans.
• It has over 5.5 billion owned views on social media. But given that until Power Slap 6, no tickets were sold and only social media influencers were invited to attend, there's no telling how many total views the six official Power Slap events have received on social media. Rapper Travis Scott attended Power Slap 6 at the Durango Resort on Feb. 9 on Super Bowl weekend. He live streamed some of the matches on his Instagram account, which at one point had 200,000 concurrent viewers. That translates to millions of viewers in all.
• Power Slap reached two million subscribers on YouTube in 13 months with less than 1,000 videos. By comparison, it took the NHL 15 years with more than 20,000 videos to reach two million subscribers.
• It has already surpassed 13 million followers combined on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.
White, who by chance in 2018 happened upon a slap fighting video from Poland and thought it would be huge if packaged and promoted properly, had an impish grin as he listened to Lamicella go on about the numbers. Finally, he put his fork down and leaned forward to emphasize a point to a visitor.
"Think about this," White said. "Numbers don't lie. This has all been done in 13 months; 13 f*cking months. I mean, think of it, just 13 months! It's like this (snaps his fingers). It's nothing. And look where we are! This thing is already a massive f*cking success. Now, how do you measure success? Well, there are several ways to do it. There's financially, and this thing is off the f*cking charts financially. You can measure it with numbers and viewership. This blows everything out of the f*cking water. And if you look at the growth over the last 13 months, it's almost unbelievable."
Power Slap already has a valuation of $650 million. White said at a Power Slap 6 post-event news conference that there have already been numerous offers to purchase the company. It's not expected to be long before the company has a $1 billion valuation. It has partnerships with mainstream brands such as Anheuser-Busch, Monster Energy, Zynga and Fanatics.
Critics have screamed about one fighter being allowed to whack another undefended, and they've wondered where the sport is in it. They've also suggested it is going to cause serious brain injury, though statistics provided by Lamicella don't show that yet.
There have been 127 regulated matches since Power Slap's inception and over 500 slaps delivered. There have been no severe injuries and no positive CT scans. Lamicella said 41 percent of the athletes received no medical suspension at all and less than five percent received suspensions longer than 60 days.
It's been sanctioned already by the Nevada Athletic Commission, the California State Athletic Commission and the Florida Athletic Commission. Sanctioning in Texas is expected within a month. There are meetings scheduled to get it legalized in Arizona, Hawaii and New Jersey, as well.
Power Slap debuted on TBS on Jan. 18, 2023, less than three weeks after video of White slapping his wife, Anne, in a club in Mexico on New Year's Eve emerged. The ratings were solid, though not spectacular, averaging between 285,000 and 315,000 an episode. It was outperforming the ratings for The Ultimate Fighter on ESPN starring Conor McGregor.
But the two executives who worked a deal for Warner Brothers to bring Power Slap to TBS were fired in a corporate restructuring before the show aired. Those who took their place weren't interested in it and quickly cut the cord when Season 1 ended.
White never doubted his plan when TBS axed it and he quickly moved the franchise to the streaming service Rumble. The acquisition of Power Slap helped enable Rumble to do a deal with BarStool Sports, and create an entire sports division.
Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski raved about the impact Power Slap has had on his company and noted it is still in its nascent stages.
"I feel like we've only just begun," Pavlovski said. "I've been watching it since the very beginning and I can tell you the momentum behind this sport is the most I've ever seen. Its attractiveness to the influencer community, the feedback that I get anecdotally, the numbers that I see that are raw facts; I don't think we've ever had a better time. It's just starting and it's the best it's ever been and I only see it getting bigger. This thing has so much legs over the next couple of years."
The numbers on Rumble have consistently been large, Pavlovski said. Concurrent viewership denotes how many viewers are watching a livestream at a given second. Total views counts all viewership on an event, meaning if one person left and came back two other times, that person would count for three. Unique views denote how many different people watched an event and each person only counts once.
Rumble has consistently been over 100,000 concurrent views for its events.
"For live-streaming creators, anything in the 100,000 concurrent range is super successful," Pavlovski said. " ... Doing 100,000 concurrent viewers on a livestream is a major success, and Slap always hits that mark. They're always around that mark, and that's a massive success."
Power Slap 5 took place at UFC Apex in Las Vegas on Oct. 25, the same night as a Republican presidential debate was held. Both events were live-streamed on Rumble. The Slap fighting event outdrew the debate in concurrent viewers and total viewers, but White made an important distinction.
"People didn't leave the debate and then go to the f*cking Power Slap event," White said. "These were different people."
"Rumble has been able to build a brand around sports because of it," Lamicella said.
Jeff Bottari/Power Slap
Ryan "King of Kings" Phillips celebrates a Feb. 9 KO of Nate Burnard at Power Slap 6 which earned him a shot at heavyweight champion Damien Dibbell on April 12.
The money isn't close to what top boxers or MMA fighters can expect to earn, but Austin Turpin, who will fight Ron "Wolverine" Bata for the light heavyweight title in the co-main event of Power Slap 7 on April 12 in Las Vegas, said competing in the sport has changed his life.
He was able to quit his job and focus on slapping as a full-time career. He was effusive in his praise of White, Lamicella, UFC executive Hunter Campbell and Power Slap matchmaker Erica Olsthoorn when asked in a YouTube interview if he could make a living simply by slap fighting.
"This has changed my life," Turpin said. "Mrs. Erica, if you're watching, thank you. Mr. Frank, if you're watching, thank you. Hunter, Dana, if you guys are watching. thank you so much. I'm going to continue to put my f*cking ass out there and grind for y'all. This has changed my life so much. Kev, I mean, I just got married last year. I just bought a house. I own my vehicle. I'm about to finance a boat. This has completely changed my life, dude. I was just working a f*cking 9 to 5 check-to-check, hoping that I'd be able to have steak for dinner on Fridays. You know, so now I'm honestly living a dream and you know, for a regular guy like me, just to maybe get a chance of speaking to somebody who's living that same life, do whatever it f*cking takes any time you see an opportunity like this.
"Put your all into it. Don't half-ass nothing. If you're going to do a job, do it f*cking right. This has changed my life completely. The money is amazing, and I'm traveling all over the place. I just got to go to a beautiful resort [in Las Vegas]. I've never been to Vegas before. I mean, I've only seen it on the TVs and when I was out there, it was even better than the TV. All the lights, the cameras, the this and that all over the place."
White is seemingly more proud of Power Slap than he is of the UFC, and his success in not only saving the UFC, but MMA itself, is well documented. The sport was dying and the UFC was a financial mess when White along with childhood friends and business partners Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta bought it for $2 million in January 2001.
It was sold to Endeavor in 2016 for more than $4 billion and was valued at nearly $13 billion in 2023.
Much of what he's seeing is familiar to White. The criticism he receives for what some perceive as the violent nature of the event, the young demographic he attracts and the ability to gain sanctioning in various states mirrors what he went through in building the UFC.
There is one glaring difference: Nearly four years into White's reign running the UFC, it was $40 million in the hole. The success didn't begin to come until after The Ultimate Fighter aired in 2005, and it took time to become profitable.
Power Slap is already profitable and rapidly increasing in value. All of the original investors have been paid back. Advertisers are knocking on White's door, and the show is going to head out onto the road.
It might be the business story of the year, or of the next few years. The videos White saw in 2018 from Poland had hundreds of millions of views even with no business plan behind it. The sheer volume of the numbers got White's attention quickly.
"I started thinking, 'What could this do if I did this?' " White said. "I wondered, 'What if I put on good production and got it sanctioned and made it a sport. What would happen?' And I just kept thinking it would be huge. And I wasn't f*cking wrong."
It's also a global sport so the growth potential is larger. Slap leagues are popping up around the country and around the world. And White saw the power of social media to help fuel its rise.
"You know, Dana told us this would be a sport built exclusively on social and digital media and that that would clearly be the future, and he was absolutely right," Lamicella said. "We're well-positioned because this thing has an unbelievably massive global appeal."