WASHINGTON, DC – JUNE 14: A fan competes in a Power Slap during the UFC Freedom 250 Fan Fest at The Ellipse on June 14, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Matt Ferris/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images)
Matt Ferris | Ufc | Getty Images
Mixed martial arts has seen unprecedented growth in recent years since the UFC took off. And, according to UFC President and CEO Dana White, it may not be the last fight to do so.
“[Power Slap] it could be as big as the UFC,” White told Andrew Ross Sorkin at the CNBC Sport x Boardroom Game Plan Summit on Thursday in New York City.
“If you look at the numbers, we like YouTube’s most-viewed sports short on Power Slap, most-viewed sports on TikTok, and the numbers are stellar for what we’re pulling from this thing,” he said. “And it’s global. It’s become a global business.”
Power Slap, for those who may have missed clips of the deadly virus in a bad way, consists of two competitors standing on a table in the middle of a wheeled stage, slapping each other with open-ended blows until one person can’t recover. The mix of anti-semitism and horror has captured the attention of viewers, and White’s tenacity around his growing popularity is not just talk.
According to social media analytics platform Socialpruf, Power Slap garnered 1.88 billion views last year, with its posts garnering nearly 40 million likes and $48 million in earned media value.
Many high-profile sponsors have capitalized on this wave of fame, jumping at the chance to throw their names into the mix of flat palms. Anheuser-Busch, Monster Energy, VeChain, Circa Sports, and 500 Casino are among the many brands that have bought into White’s vision for the game so far.
“I thought funding would be difficult,” White noted. “[Power Slap] has more sponsors [in its first two years] than the UFC has had in 10 years.”
Finding collaborators willing to take the beats seen regularly in the world of Power Slap can prove to be more difficult than finding advertisers. In conducting this strange type of talent acquisition, White emphasized toughness, grit, and high pain tolerance as weighty considerations.
“There are tens to hundreds of thousands of people wrestling all over the world every weekend. They’ll jump off a ladder and into a table full of sneakers for $50 a night,” he said. “These are the guys I’m after.”
What makes slap-boxing so successful? Two things, White says, can be applied to every successful show: “You need to have a good live event, and you need to be good on TV.”
But since Power Slap’s primary audience growth comes in the form of short videos posted on social media rather than live television broadcasts, White emphasized the latter aspect.
That’s how White first saw the game.
“In 2017 and 2018, these things started appearing on my social media,” he said. “Everything I do in the fight business I do with my gut, and the fact that I’m going to watch it and want to see who wins, I said this is interesting.”
White said when he delved into it, he saw how many sap-boxing ideas there were, which he said were “the size of a Justin Bieber video at the time” on YouTube.
That led him to commission the Fertitta brothers, who had left their UFC stint, to invest in the business, which was founded in 2022.
White is also leading an investment in a boxing venture called Zuffa Boxing, which aims to use the same model that the UFC has followed.
Holding its first event in January, White said Zuffa Boxing is a better short-term bet than Power Slap, because, White said, “boxing has been broken for a long time.”
“We have been living in it for six months now, we can understand why it is broken,” he said. “All these promoters that I’m competing with, they’re terrible at what they do…there’s a lot that hasn’t gone well than I expected.”
White said that “the business of boxing has always been amazing economically,” that fights and cards can generate huge amounts of money. But he added, “Every time they fight, it’s like going out of business,” he said.
Zuffa Boxing – along with other fight properties led by White – aims to put that money back into the hands of fighters.
“It’s getting a lot better,” White said of the economics of fighters. “First of all, these Power Slap guys were hitting for free when I bought the companies. Now they’re getting paid very well. As for the UFC fighters, the pay has gone up like this since we bought the business,” he waved his hands up.
