I worked in a gym with ufc fighters for four years and saw the marketing first hand. Also, one of my good friends I met there managed att in coconut creek and they have a ton of ufc fighters.
Fighters I’ve seen generally don’t pay the gym, they pay a trainer/training partners part of their purse or direct pay for the help. The gym paying fighters is very rare. That’s what the blackzillion model did (sponsored by Jaco I believe) and they tanked.
One common misconception in my experience is that ufc fighters attract memberships. It would blow your fucking mind how much that is not the case. The gym I worked at sold 2500 memberships while I was there and I interacted with every single one. There were two people that came as a result of fighters. As in, get, I came to meet/train under this guy. Literally two. Maybe two dozen knew who the fighters even were beforehand.
Most people who came to train mma were not die hard ufc fans, but became so after they started training. We joke about that with my friend all the time. People think that the average ufc groupie online would be your target market and it’s not the case at all.
It was fucking rare for someone to be a hardcore fan and to show up and want to train at either of those two gyms.