FiveOuncesOfPain.com established new records in its site history during the month of July for unique visitors and page viewers, breaking its previous record established during the month of June.

Despite the summer traditionally being a slow month for the sport of Mixed Martial Arts, Five Ounces of Pain has experienced a surge in growth, thanks in large part to major events promoted by the UFC, Affliction, DREAM, and EliteXC during the month of July. The site also debuted a new web design which also allowed us to set our new mark for unique visits and page views in a month.

July was not only a big month for us traffic-wise, but it was a strong month for us from a content standpoint, as we brought you several big interviews as well as quite a few exclusive news stories.

I wanted to thank everyone for continuing to support the site. We really do appreciate the fact that many of you have decided to share this site with your family and friends. Word of mouth is the biggest reason for our growth considering we have yet to spend any money on marketing. It means a lot to me that people are getting the word out because the first site I owned was a fantasy football website. I would quite often receive e-mails from subscribers saying to the effect “This is such a great source for fantasy analysis! It’s so good that I am keeping it a secret from everyone in my league.” It was always nice to hear the praise, but it would kill me to hear people say they were unwilling to spread the word.

Stay tuned as we’ll have a few more site-related announcements next week. Our Site Operations Administrator Matt Cava and myself have been hard at work on a lot of behind-the-scenes business stuff. Some of it we can’t talk about but some of it we’ll be able to talk about next week.

Also, as an aside, I am going through a full technology upgrade. It will allow me to become a better contributor to the site but it’s also been a tremendous pain in the ass and very time consuming. Not only did we debut a new design but we upgraded our publishing tool and will be upgrading our server (yes, another server upgrade). I also broke down and bought a new computer because the one I had was five years old.

I also switched to an iPhone because my T-Mobile sidekick was going on four years of age and wouldn’t allow me to update the site on the road. The problem is, I lost ALL of my contact info in the transition from T-Mobile to AT&T. Yes, this is a doomsday situation for me. If you’re one of the people we speak to on a regular basis or a semi-regular basis, or, are a fighter or manager that just wants us to have your contact info so we can refer to you for future stories, please e-mail it to me at SCaplan@comcast.net.

As you can tell, we debuted a brand new site design and layout for 5 Oz. of Pain last night.

I hope you all enjoy the new look. We believe it’s much cleaner and sleeker and overall, just more professional looking.

This is just one of several new projects we’ve been working on. We’re still working out some kinks (such as the server load time) so your patience is appreciated.

I wanted to thank our designer, Derek Bess, and our site operations administrator, Matt Cava, for all the hard work they put into the new site.

5 Oz. of Pain continues to grow and we’ll have some forthcoming announcements we’ll be making soon. Thanks again to everyone who supports the work that we do here. It’s greatly appreciated.

Yes, the title is a bit mis-leading. But it’s technically true.

On Monday, FiveOuncesOfPain.com broke its record for page views in a single day. The staff here was kind of surprised to see a major traffic surge following a non-fight weekend.

After some simple research we were able to see where the traffic was coming from: search hits from people using the term “Gina Carano.”

Nearly 20% of our traffic the last two days have been from first-time viewers to the site who stumbled upon us by doing a search on Carano via a major search engine such as Google or Yahoo!

If you’re one of those people who have stumbled upon us, thanks for checking us out and we hope you enjoy what you’ve been reading and stick around.

We know that other sites have experienced a rise in traffic from Carano searches as well. Right now, she’s the hottest thing in MMA and has been burning up search engines.

I’m still a little perplexed though because while I haven’t had a chance to watch American Gladiators, my friends and family have said that Carano, who appears on the show under the alter-ego “Crush,” has not been mentioned by her real name. And while a past as a “former cage fighter” has apparently been referenced, EliteXC has not been referred to by name. Somehow, people are still making the correlation between “Crush” and Gina Carano.

As a special thanks, here’s some video of Gina in action on AG, courtesy of NBC:

Check out more Gina Carano content on FiveOuncesofPain.com

Ivan Trembow has a report at MMAWeekly.com about the Dynamite Attendance that is about 1,000 times better than mine:

http://www.mmaweekly.com/absolutenm/templates/dailynews.asp?articleid=4100

I’m getting a lot of e-mails and reading a lot of message forum posts about why certain sites (such as Sherdog.com) and this site are reporting two different attendance figures for FEG’s Dynamite USA!! show this past Saturday.

Well, we’re all reading the same reports, we’re just interpreting them differently.

It’s actually an age old debate that has been going on in sports for quite some time when it comes to attendance: is final, official reported attendance: 

a) paid attendance (total tickets bought/sold)

or

b) actual physical attendance (people who actually showed up to the event… the head count, turnstile count, etc.).

Here are the facts according to the numbers released by the California State Athletic Commission:

Tickets Sold: 42,757

Turnstile Count: 18,340

It’s up to you to decide whether you believe paid attendance (total tickets sold) or actual attendance (people who showed up) should count as the official attendance number.

Now, CSAC has a disclaimer in its report that certain gates did not have turnstiles, opening up the possibility that people who sat in seats to the event were never officially counted. I don’t have facts, but I have little doubt more than 18,340 somehow made it into the LA Coliseum this past Saturday. But you can’t report official attendance as people who weren’t physically counted.

I don’t believe 42,757 people were ever physically in seats and here’s why: ticketmaster and the LA Coliseum sold 3,674 tickets. The report also says that tickets sold by FEG total 39,083. Now, you might be wondering who FEG sold those tickets to? Well, according to Loretta Hunt of The Fight Network (one of the most trusted reporters in this industry), FEG sold those tickets to themselves!

The vast majority of the 39,083 tickets that FEG bought from themselves (at a reduced rate, since they bought them in bulk) were distributed in the LA area, similiar to the way flyers are handed out on the street (and we all know everyone holds onto a flyer that’s handed to them by a complete stranger). So for the 42,757 number to be actual attendance, it would have meant everyone who was handed a free ticket decided to use it.

What’s the likelihood of that actually happening?

So FEG used smoke and mirrors and shady accounting just so they can claim they set the attendance record for a single MMA event in the U.S.

Which brings us back to tickets sold vs. tickets used.

In Major League Baseball, some teams report official attendance as tickets sold while others report official attendance as tickets used. That’s why a team might sell 35,000 tickets for a game and report it as the official number on a rainy night when only 22,000 people showed up.

So what’s the difference between what some MLB teams do and what FEG did? Well, the teams that use their official number as tickets sold actually sold tickets to real human beings! They didn’t sell them to themselves! You know, the Washington Nationals have bad attendance totals at times. But they don’t buy tickets from themselves in large quantities so they can fudge numbers (well, some teams find other ways to fudge numbers, but that’s a different story).

Based on the fact that the tickets sold in question that weren’t used were tickets bought by FEG, how can anyone report the paid attendance as the actual attendance for the Dynamite USA!! event without some sort of asterisk or disclaimer?

Furthermore, why should FEG be viewed as the record holder for MMA attendance in the U.S.? If any company can buy tickets to their own event and it be allowed to be considered a legitimate practice when reporting official attendance, then the records are a joke and attendance shouldn’t even be counted in the first place. CSAC tracks attendance and CSAC is a government agency. That means the salary of the employees on the commission are paid for by the tax payers. So the people of California are paying money just so a company like FEG can boast a bogus attendance record?

One more thing to add. The total house for the show was $2,545,590. But the total gross receipts for tickets sold by the Coliseum and Ticketmaster (i.e. the total amount of money generated by tickets FEG didn’t sell to themselves) was just $203,090.

I love MMA and I have no personal gripe with FEG or K-1. I would have liked the show to do well. But it didn’t, and I’m not going to report shady accounting as fact.

More than 18,340 people were probably at the event. But nobody officially counted them and that’s the bottom line, folks.

The California State Athletic Commission has made the attendance figures available for FEG’s Dynamite USA!! show that took place this past Saturday at the LA Coliseum.

Total attendance for the show was 18,340 . The paid attendance was 3,674.  The total house was approximately $2.3 million in gross receipts.

Loretta Hunt from The Fight Network reported on Mauro Ranallo’s radio show earlier this week that FEG has purchased tickets from themselves (buying them at a bulk rate) and put them out on the streets to be distributed in the days leading up to the event. It looks like that number was 39,083. The number of comps (tickets that FEG didn’t have to buy in order to give away) was 13,600.

The actual turnstile count (total of number of people who attended, paid and free) was 18,340 (CSAC had someone whose sole job it was on Saturday to handle tracking the number of fans entering the Coliseum).

FEG’s reported number of over 50,000 in attendance was totally bogus.