UFC Profits Total $349 Million in 2009: ... and Dana thinks it could've been more.As the UFC’s market share further expands, so do the revenues yielded by their pay-per-view telecasts. To the tune of 20 events last year, the UFC posted an unprecedented $349 million in profits. Withstanding the figures of what Affliction, Strikeforce, Bellator and DREAM were able to pull together worldwide, the UFC is by far the largest and most profitable venture of them all for the year ending 2009.

As such, the UFC has taken to the role of protecting their investments and assets unlike any of the others could.

Beginning in 2010, and starting with the testimony of Lorenzo Fertitta before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, the UFC looks to take a more analytic aim at determining the sources of pirated events. As stated by Mr. Fertitta, for UFC 106 alone, an anti-piracy task force set out to search for live streams or sources of download for the event, and were surprised to see a little more than 270 streams offered to just under an estimated 150,000 viewers.

To Zuffa, that’s about 150,000 more paying customers at $50 per event.

"The piracy of live sporting events is illegal, it kills jobs, and it threatens the expansion of U.S. based companies," Fertitta told lawmakers as he looked to highlight the expansion of his own company for the committee.

"The UFC is potentially losing millions of dollars a year from piracy," he continued.

Dana White’s view of things is a bit more hard-line, choosing to disavow potential theories for the sake of the pursuit of those actually pirating the events.

"[Piracy] hasn't cost us anything compared to what it's going to cost us to go after these guys," White said. "It's going to cost us a lot of money, but guess what — it's going to cost them a lot of money. It's going to get to the point where it's like, you know what, [expletive] it, maybe we shouldn't pirate MMA anymore,” says the UFC President.

"You got these websites like Justin.tv, and they pirate all kinds of things. They play all kinds of [expletive] on there. Well, we're going to make it where it's not worth it to put UFC events up on the website."

UFC commentator Joe Rogan’s view of things is a bit more in tune with the reality of things. Beyond any effort by any organization to pursue legal action based on electronic grounds, Joe seems to see the bigger picture.

"I think that kind of stifles innovation," the veteran UFC commentator had to say. "It stifles the direction the Internet is going. I like things being out there. I think people are always going to buy UFC pay-per-views. You're going to get a much better experience watching it on your television than all stretched out looking fuzzy and pixilated. They're trying to protect their money, but the Internet is a strange animal."

As the UFC grows to become one of the largest martial arts promotion in the history of this multifaceted sport, one thing becomes obvious: it’s going to be harder and harder for them to continue putting out a purchase-worthy product as time dwindles, especially considering the ground that competing organizations gained on the UFC in 2009.

Dana White himself admitted that the UFC will put much more into pursuing piracy than piracy has actually cost them, which is another crucial indicator in the scheme of things. The modern-day internet, thanks to copyright laws in nations that host these websites, can quite frankly continue to evolve as it currently does without any one entity having much of a pull on the direction in which it heads, save perhaps Google.

UFC general legal counsel, Lawrence Epstein, has an optimistic and particularly fairy-tale viewpoint on the issue.

"I think this is about stopping the good majority of law-abiding citizens who, without education, might not understand that what they're doing is not the right thing to do," says the happy-go-lucky legal consultant.

What he fails to analyze within the scope of the organization he’s consulting with are the following:

1) The UFC has taken to a sometimes consumer-unfriendly way of catering to a fan-base that’s primary stake is in internet communities. When the sport surged so long ago to become the charging entity that it is today, it did so behind the steam of the fans the powered it: a techno-savvy, modern-day enlightened outfit of users who’d been watching these fights via internet for years before the UFC had a product worth pirating.

2) Let’s just say that in the case of MMA fans as they relate to the UFC, this contingent is driving the revenues on a major scale. Yet, when those fans are mostly of the internet-aware variety and the UFC stops listening to them, the organization then perceivably has two options: produce a product that will unarguably earn the praise of the hardcore enthusiasts despite competition, or look to legal avenues to sidestep the subject at hand.

Overall, the quality of the UFC’s product has been outstanding over the course of the last three years, throughout overtaking Pride, and as they’ve more solidly established their heavyweight division. The best fighters, without question, are fighting in the UFC. Yet, when the organization can give us a blockbuster like Diego Sanchez vs. BJ Penn in one fight, then a snoozefest like Thiago Silva vs. Rashad Evans one event later, you have to wonder if the UFC’s putting these fights up regardless of the quality of available talent to participate in them.

In the end, what you have is a never-ending cycle of fans looking for the next big thing, while the organization primarily providing what those fans watch insists upon its product despite obvious quality deficiencies. While it can be argued that the law puts the UFC in the right regarding the protection of their product from piracy, there’s nowhere near the advocacy on the side of the fans who put up $50 per televised event to receive the equivalent of two qualified athletes putting on an under-qualifying match-up as a main event.

It should make fans even happier that the UFC’s intent is not to target the individual websites providing the links, but rather the users working to purvey the piracy of these events, such as those found on newsgroups and in the increasingly-popular bit torrent community. Even then, considering both the effect and extent of the measures that the RIAA and various motion picture outfits have been able to utilize in pursuing their own anti-piracy initiatives, it remains to be seen how much more effective the UFC’s can possibly be.

Perhaps fans would be more eager to see live events than download pirated events if they were all worth purchasing.

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