Obviously, but that wasn't my point.
My point was that I wouldn't be surprised if it was already bigger than the NRL in under 30s (maybe even under 35s) in Australia, and that it'll outgrow the NRL's popularity in Australia in our lifetimes if it can maintain it's current rate of growth.
Firstly that's nonsense on face value, it absolutely has strong coverage in the mainstream, especially through digital platforms.
Secondly, the UFC uses a pay per view model, so you wouldn't expect it's ratings to be comparable to the other big sports whom use traditional broadcasting models like FTA and Pay TV. The UFC would pull numbers highly competitive with the other major sports around the world if it could use a FTA model instead of PPV, but it doesn't use that model for a whole host of commercial and cultural reasons.
To paraphrase Michael Jordan; males buy sneakers too.
If anything males, especially young males, are one of the least catered to demographics in the market, and society more generally, at the moment, so it's a good niche for a business to target because there's little to no competition.
But anyway, the UFC would have similar female interest to any of the other combat and contact sports, and their female participation and divisions are way more developed than almost any other sport on the planet.
When Ronda Rousey was at her peak she was the highest paid fighter in the UFC, and the UFC's female divisions have been profitable independent of subsidies from the male divisions in the past (IDK if that's still the case). Aside from female dominated sports with no male professional alternative, I don't know of a single league other than the UFC that could claim to have achieved anything similar to those two achievements in female sports.
I don't know about that. It's a niche that sits empty in the Australian domestic sports market.
I don't really have a strong opinion either way, but whether we like it or not there's demand for violence and brutality, and the NRL could play to that audience. The question then becomes whether that audience could be more profitable than a more general audience, and none of us here have that answer.
I can tell you this though, the NRLW has been so poorly set up that it'll almost certainly never be sustainable, let alone profitable, independent of subsidies from the NRL. There's also no future in converting touch and tag players to tackle en masse, nor is there a future in professional touch or tag. So the NRL will have to play into it's violence and brutality at least to some degree, and continue to appeal to a mainly male audience, if it is to survive into the future.
