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Kimbomania: The insane Internet popularity of Kimbo Slice

If you read the comments on my Kimbo Slice mea culpa, you’ll remember that I did some research to measure his popularity online. That is an essential component of my suggestion that he’ll be a top ten heavyweight contender within a year or two–he’s so damn popular already that he’ll get every opportunity to train and fight. At the very least, he’ll be the US version of Bob Sapp. If Kimbo is willing to dedicate himself to becoming a serious professional fighter he could become the biggest superstar MMA has ever seen–a MMA version of Mike Tyson.

There were some problems with the original Google data I used, as it measured the number of website references listed on Google modified by an adjective. I used “tough”, which a commenter correctly suggested might favor some fighters over others. So last night I did a little research on the names of the fighters alone. Basically, this data measures the number of web pages listed by Google with any mention of the fighter’s name at all. It’s not an exact measure of popularity (assuming that there is such a thing) but does give a general idea of the relative popularity of individual fighters. For my list of MMA fighters I chose a combination of the other top heavyweight fighters, along with some of the more popular fighters of other weight classes to give you some idea of where Kimbo ranks. I also threw in some boxers and even UFC president Dana White. Here’s the results:

Chuck Liddell: 529,215
Matt Hughes: 346,000
BJ Penn: 314,000
Kimbo Slice: 312,000
Randy Couture: 303,000
Wanderlei Silva: 271,000
Frank Shamrock: 230,000
Bob Sapp: 225,000
Fedor Emelianenko: 215,000
Mirko Cro Cop: 215,000
Rich Franklin: 205,000
Tim Sylvia: 160,000
Josh Barnett: 104,000
Andrei Arlovski: 104,000

and….

Dana White: 601,000

First, a few observations on these numbers. My thinking is that due to the limitations of the research tools I used that the popularity of fighters who’ve been associated with PRIDE during much of their career is underrepresented. The reason for this is simple–these numbers reflect only English language websites and my thinking is that guys like Mirko, Fedor, Barnett, and Wanderlei Silva have a lot of references on Japanese language websites. Also, its interesting that Dana White has a higher Google number than any of his fighters.

The fact that Chuck Liddell has the highest Google number among MMA fighters isn’t really surprising–he’s considered to be the most popular fighter in the UFC among “mainstream” fans. I was surprised to see Randy Couture have fewer Google hits than BJ Penn or Matt Hughes, particularly with all of the coverage afforded his win over Tim Sylvia.

But take a look at Kimbo Slice’s Google hit number which puts him in the top tier of MMA fighter popularity (or at least name recognition) already. Whether you think he’s a sideshow attraction or, as I do, that he could become a legit contender in the sport you can’t deny that the “buzz” surrounding him is pretty damn amazing. When you further consider that the other guys at the top of the list–Couture, Liddell, Hughes, Penn, etc.–have the powerful Zuffa/UFC promotion machine behind them and Kimbo’s popularity is more or less “organic” its downright astounding. One can only speculate how popular he could become with the UFC promoting him.

And here’s an interesting aside–I also threw in the names of some top boxers. The results seem to invalidate a lot of the mainstream media generated hype that MMA is surpassing boxing in terms of popularity:

George Foreman: 1,850,000
Mike Tyson: 1,630,000
Oscar De La Hoya: 999,000
Floyd Mayweather: 759,000
Roy Jones: 616,000

Clearly these are among the highest profile fighters in the sport, but for now at least the top boxers’ Google hit numbers far exceed those of their MMA counterparts.

The data used here was obtained from a service called “GoogleDuel”.

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