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Power Slap is leaving TBS and is going with a completely all-digital strategy.
On Saturday, Power Slap held its first-ever live event at the UFC Apex in Las Vegas that aired live for free on Rumble.
The live stream peaked at 190k concurrent viewers and generated nearly 3 million views on Rumble.
Not long after the event ended, Dana White revealed the new slap league would be leaving TBS and had signed a two-year deal with Rumble.
Saturday night was a MASSIVE success! Thanks to everyone who tuned in. It’s official, Rumble @rumblevideo is now the EXCLUSIVE home of @powerslapleague pic.twitter.com/z9eqPejPJS
— danawhite (@danawhite) March 13, 2023
During Power Slap’s post-fight press conference, White spoke about the deal with Rumble, the ratings on TBS and why he had decided to go with an all-digital strategy.
“We’re f—ing thrilled with the Rumble deal, “Very happy to be on Rumble and they’re the perfect platform for us right now. This whole thing for us has been a seven month test, because we go back to last march when we really started kicking this thing around and playing with it. So this has been a test, there’s no doubt, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out where this thing should air and where it should be.”
“There was a lot of criticism about the TV ratings,” White said. “People are so full of s— it’s f—ing — first off, what do any of these people know about TV ratings, number one. And like I told ya, the thing averaged 375,000 viewers on TBS with zero advertising from the network. Zero. We held 50 percent of the AEW audience.
“And the night that Kyrie moved over to Dallas and Dallas played the Clippers, that was on ESPN,” he continued. “What had more publicity and attention than Kyrie moving to Dallas? That had 575,000 viewers. We did 317,000 at the exact same time. They were on ESPN, we’re on TBS. We were number two with men on all television, they were number one.
“That’s an incredible number, especially when this thing skews younger, and none of these people watch TV,” he concluded. “These kids don’t watch TV, none of them. They watch on their phones or the computer.”
White went on to tout Power Slap’s social media numbers that saw one video get 31 million video views on TikTok and another generate 13 million views on Instagram.
‘The social and streaming numbers are nuts, the worst Power Slap post of the day did better than the best UFC post of the day, on UFC’s social.’
It’s unclear when season 2 of Power Slap will air, but early indications is that it will take place overseas in Abu Dhabi.