The ratings numbers are in for this past Sunday's UFC Freedom 250 event on the White House lawn, and by almost any realistic metric they represent a success. Those key words — "almost" and "realistic" — are doing some important work. We'll get into that momentarily. But let's take it one step at a time.

The numbers

An average of about 8.2 million people watched this UFC event live on Paramount+ across the United States and Latin America. Around 17 million viewers watched at least one minute of the live broadcast on Sunday night, making this the biggest live event audience Paramount+ has ever had in its roughly five-year history. (Though this is not a record audience for Paramount+ generally, which has drawn more viewers for scripted dramas like "Dutton Ranch.")

Ratings numbers from other areas of the world are expected next week, and these figures don't include people who circle back to watch it later.

The context

When we ask whether or not these numbers are good for the UFC, we have to consider all the variables. This was a Sunday night event that was delayed by weather and didn't really get going until 9 p.m. ET. That right there probably hurts the audience figures, since some people have to get up early and work on a Monday morning.

The broadcast was also restricted to the Paramount+ streaming service. Heading into this event, Paramount+ had about 79 million subscribers, according to recent reports, which would put it just outside the top five streaming services in terms of audience size.

This was also a busy weekend for sports on TV in general, which included the opening weekend of the World Cup and the conclusive games of the NBA Finals and Stanley Cup Finals. All three of those options aired on network TV, with the UFC coming in late on Sunday as essentially the last live sports event of the weekend.

The comparisons

The big question is: How do these ratings stack up against comparable event broadcasts? One previous high-water mark for the UFC was its debut offering on FOX back in 2011. There, a one-fight card featuring a UFC heavyweight title bout averaged 5.7 million viewers, with a peak of 8.8 million viewers for a fight that lasted just 64 seconds.

The MVP MMA card headlined by Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano on Netflix last month beat that figure with a peak of 17 million viewers worldwide and a reported 9.3 million U.S. average. The UFC White House event fell short of these MVP MMA numbers, but it also did so on a much smaller streaming service. (At last report, Netflix had around 325 million subscribers globally, about four times as many as Paramount+ had headed into the weekend.)

Beyond MMA, this event doesn't come close to the numbers for something like this year's Super Bowl (126 million viewers worldwide) or the last FIFA World Cup Final (1.5 billion). It also falls well short of this year's NBA Finals, which averaged 24.5 million viewers for Game 5 and peaked with 33 million. It does, however, beat Game 6 of this year's Stanley Cup Finals, which averaged 5.9 million viewers and peaked with 7.2 million.

The claims

Remember that part up top about "almost any realistic metric" for this event? Here's where things get tricky. Prior to the UFC White House event, we heard all manner of hype surrounding expected viewership stats. UFC CEO Dana White said he was expecting "Super Bowl numbers." U.S. Secretary of State Marcio Rubio floated the idea that more than 1 billion (not a typo, that's billion with a "b") people worldwide would be watching. U.S. President Donald Trump himself at one point suggested that it would be one of the most-watched sports events of all time.

Even after the event, UFC commentator and podcast host Joe Rogan claimed on his show that he'd heard as many as 150 million people had watched this event between Sunday and Monday. That estimate turned out to be off by about a factor of 10, which seems … significant.

If not for this hyperbolic build-up, the UFC White House event ratings might have been instantly accepted as a clear success. But by setting the bar so high in advance, these various stakeholders essentially guaranteed that the audience numbers would look like a disappointment by comparison.

By MMA standards, and given the audience size on Paramount+, these are good numbers. It's only when compared to the entirely unrealistic expectations set by those responsible for promoting this event that it looks paltry.

Why did they do that? Maybe because they believed that projecting an image of outsized success would help manifest it on fight night. If you tell everyone that this is the biggest party in town, the thinking seems to have gone, maybe it will make them more likely to show up. It didn't work out that way. Seems like an obvious and totally unforced error on their part.

The case for why we even care

If you're not a television executive, a Trump administration official, or a shareholder of TKO Group Holdings LLC and/or Paramount, you might be asking yourself why it matters how many people watched this thing. It's a fair question.

MMA fans were watching and enjoying this sport in relative obscurity for years. It didn't ever diminish our enjoyment of it just because there weren't tens of millions of others watching with us elsewhere in the world.

But clearly it matters to the UFC. If it didn't, we wouldn't have heard so many grandiose promises ahead of the event. It also matters to Paramount, which hoped to use this event to drive up subscriber numbers.

That's the other key variable in all this. Paramount could have chosen to air part or all of this event on CBS, or simulcast it on both the CBS network and the Paramount+ streaming service. It kept this exclusively for Paramount+ because it wanted to entice people to sign up for a subscription. Drawing the largest possible audience was obviously not the goal for Paramount. If it had been, CBS would have aired this event on Sunday night instead of reruns of "Marshals" and "Tracker."

This is, in some ways, the resurrection of an old conversation for longtime MMA fans. In a bygone era, we used to worry a lot about the growth of the sport. We wanted to see it survive and thrive, and for that we felt like we needed audience growth. Viewership numbers are good metric of that, though in the fragmented era of endless streaming services, they're certainly not the only one.

The conclusion

Beyond just the numbers, what this event managed to do — for better or worse — was to become a cultural event. Even people who never were and maybe never will be fight fans still heard about it. Some drew positive conclusions and others instantly negative ones. Such is the case when the event itself is so closely tied to a polarizing political figure like Trump, who inspires passionate loyalty in some and revulsion in others. A lot of people who never think about the UFC were essentially forced to form an opinion about it.

If one of the primary goals was a major gain for the UFC brand in terms of visibility and awareness, then mission accomplished. If the point of all this was to knock the Super Bowl off its ratings podium, well, there's still a long way to go.

Source: Yahoo Entertainment