Did Bisping and Silva give UFC Fight Pass the push it needed?

It was an “historic night beyond our wildest dreams,” according to Eric Winter, the senior vice president and general manager of UFC Fight Pass.

Michael Bisping’s unanimous decision victory over Anderson Silva at UFC Fight Night 84 in London made for an entertaining and at times strange main event, but it also helped Fight Pass “break all records” for new customers and “peak concurrence” (in other words, people watching the live show all at once) – again, according to Winter.

If true, it’s good news for Fight Pass. Winter and his team put a lot of effort into this event, and this headliner, hoping it would herald the dawn of a new age for the UFC’s two-year-old streaming service. The Bisping-Silva main event was, Winter told us, “by far the biggest fight in the history of Fight Pass.”

And if you were trying to craft a fight that would help drive traffic and attention to your digital streaming service, you couldn’t have done much better than this one. Bisping vs. Silva was a fight with enough name value and intrigue to generate interest ahead of the fight, but it also had all the elements of an online attention-grabber as it unfolded in the cage.

Furious action with wild swings from start to finish? Check. A little bit of controversy, nestled there in the middle of fight, and all courtesy of a jumping knee highlight? Check. Five full rounds of action, so that even the people who insisted they didn’t care in the first minute found themselves tempted to sign up and see the whole thing by the 25th? Check.

And if the 140-character descriptions of the action weren’t enough, the UFC Twitter account tweeted out clips of the fight’s biggest moments – as the fight was happening. If you’re at all plugged in to the MMA-centric social media circles, you almost couldn’t help but get sucked in by the gravitational force of this fight.

So what does all of this mean for Fight Pass? That’s tough to say, for several reasons.

For one, there’s the question of numbers. When Winter tells us that this fight was historic, or that it broke records, we have no choice but to take his word for it (or, you know, not). The UFC doesn’t release viewership numbers for Fight Pass. UFC executives won’t even give us a hint.

(When Ariel Helwani pushed Winter for anything that would give us a real sense of the audience size – more than a million? a lot more? please, Eric, blink twice if it was a lot more – all he got were vague assurances.)

It was big. It broke records. Everything was great. Oh, and by the way, how did the Fight Pass debut of Glory Kickboxing go? “Tremendously well,” according to Winter. OK, guess that settles that.

The UFC has always been intensely secretive with its own numbers. It doesn’t tell us how many pay-per-views it sells (though thanks to reporters like Dave Meltzer, we get some idea), or how much it pays its fighters (we get glimpses of that from certain athletic commission disclosures). If it could stop those pesky TV ratings from becoming public, you get the sense that it would.

This creates problems when it wants to brag, as every fight promoter loves to do when it draws a big audience. Here we have no way of knowing if the bragging is based in reality or fiction. And when all the take-our-word-for-it news is good, if not earth-shatteringly great news, at a certain point it just becomes noise.

But so what. If your subscription-based streaming service is a hit, you get the money whether anyone believes you or not. The big question that remains for Fight Pass is whether it can keep those subscribers once it’s got them.

That’s not easy to do, especially since fights like Bisping vs. Silva are still rare enough to be special.

It’s reasonable to think it got some new customers in the door, but there’s not another Fight Pass-only UFC event for months. As long as you feel like you could live without seeing those Fight Pass early prelims (which, admittedly, have added bigger names recently), you could be forgiven for turning off your subscription until the next must-see event rolls around.

In that sense, the value proposition hasn’t changed so much. If you’re such a hardcore combat sports fan that you’ve just got to see everything from Invicta FC to Glory Kickboxing to the Eddie Bravo Invitational, then Fight Pass remains a really good deal for you. For just under 10 bucks a month, you get a steady supply of all manner of violence.

Then again, if you’re the kind of fan who cares not at all for the lower profile stuff, and instead just wants someone to tell you when Bisping vs. Silva is going to start? Yeah, you could probably settle for keeping one eye on Twitter. If nothing else, it’s good at telling you what you already missed – and what’s waiting for you on Fight Pass, whenever you’re ready.

For more on UFC Fight Night 84, check out the UFC Events section of the site.