I think when fans were leveling criticism at Dana White and the UFC for putting Alexander Gustafsson on a Fight Pass card it had less to do with the specific medium (Fight Pass) and more to do with the fact that Jon Jones wasn’t going to fight him yet. Even if Fight Night 37 wasn’t on Fight Pass, the fact still was that Alexander Gustafsson, a contender who took the champion to the limits and deserved a rematch, was headlining a UFC C-card, as opposed to being featured on one of their A-cards.
For comparison’s sake, let’s call PPV their A-cards, Fox and Fox Sports 1 as their B-cards and Fox Sports 2 and Fight Pass as C-cards. He was fighting on the equivalent of what we used to see for Fuel TV cards, which seems like a strange way to promote a guy who will be a title contender on PPV yet again. But, Dana White had a lot to say about it this weekend. [source]
“First of all, the fight is being distributed to 350 million possible viewers throughout the world. This fight is available in Canada, in Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, The Dominican Republic, Venezuela, The Phillipines, Australia, Mongolia, India, New Zealand, The UAE- Abu Dhabi and all this countries down there. In the UK, the entire will be on BT Sport, and the main event for the first time ever here will be on Channel 5, open TV to everybody. We’re in Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Croatia, and Israel. All of those countries in Israel, 350 million homes.
The A m e r i c a n s have to pay for it on Fight Pass. So the reason that this happened is, we added 10 more fights, we went to FOX and try to see if FOX would pick up these 10 more fights, and they didn’t. So that’s why we put these on Fight Pass.”
“They create their budgets at the beginning of the year and it wasn’t in their budget to pick up these fights. You know, not to say they don’t pick them up later, or whatever could happen with the deal, but that’s what happened. So, it’s either no onebody gets to see them or you put them on Fight Pass.”