Power Slap is coming to YouTube. The promotion’s founder, UFC boss Dana White, announced Monday that his upstart fighting league would be leaving conservative-leaning Rumble, its livestreaming home for its first 11 events, and moving to the world’s largest video platform beginning Friday for Power Slap 12.

The move is part of a new arrangement with blockchain platform VeChain, which will pay Power Slap $76 million over the next six years to become the naming rights sponsor of its events.

That figure represents less than half of the roughly $30 million per year that the Rumble broadcast deal was paying out, according to Forbes estimates—the majority of Power Slap’s estimated $50 million in 2024 revenue—and the promotion has no special financial arrangement with YouTube to make up the difference. Instead, it will try to fill the void by competing for views and dollars, as one content creator against the millions of others on the platform.

In a media rights landscape in which White says combat sports are “all fighting for scraps” from TV and digital distributors—and in which the UFC is also stalking a new broadcast deal for next year and beyond—he is choosing to survive off of what the league can hunt for itself. It’s exactly the kind of back-against-the-wall situation in which White says he does his best work.

“You know who I like to bet on?” White asks Forbes, rhetorically. “Me.”

Power Slap has thrived on controversy since its founding in late 2022. Its contests, which feature two combatants taking turns open-hand slapping each other, have drawn criticism from the medical community and faced an uphill climb toward legal sanctioning in most of the United States.

In January 2023, Power Slap launched with a reality show on TBS, echoing the earliest days of the UFC, when White and his business partners used The Ultimate Fighter on Spike TV to introduce audiences to mixed martial arts. However, Power Slap: Road to the Title was canceled after one season, and the promotion’s live events found their broadcast home on Rumble, a platform infamous for hosting controversial creators such as Andrew Tate.

One could look at White’s decision to take the Power Slap broadcasts in-house as a rejection by the marketplace—for example, he would never make a similar move for the UFC because it would mean forgoing a deal projected to be worth as much as $1 billion per year in its next cycle. But White insists Power Slap had offers on the table from three linear cable channels, which he declines to name.

To him, the rights are so valuable that he does not want to give them up, turning down each of the TV partnerships because of their desire to control Power Slap’s linear and digital rights as well as the corresponding sponsorships—standard deal terms for other sports leagues.

The VeChain deal, by contrast, will operate much more like a traditional sponsorship. Friday’s event at Fontainebleau Las Vegas will be called VeChain Power Slap 12, just as UFC 306 at the Sphere was officially known as Riyadh Season Noche UFC.

In addition to the VeChain deal, White says he is negotiating two other sponsorship-style deals that would bring Power Slap’s combined “rights deal” total above $35 million in 2025. Power Slap will continue to cover its own production costs, retain full ownership of its rights and keep all of the revenue it is able to generate from the digital broadcasts, including Google AdSense payments from the commercials running on YouTube.

“We own everything, and we control everything,” White says. “We are basically creating our own destiny.”

For White, the money is secondary to the long-term goal of bringing his nascent sport to a more mainstream audience, and YouTube is where much of his audience lives. Since Power Slap’s inception, White has relied heavily on internet creators to market the sport, creating a clubhouse atmosphere at each event where they can mingle and film videos. White says 350 creators have committed to attend Power Slap 12.

The strategy, as well as the sheer shock value of the slaps, has produced impressive social media statistics for Power Slap and solid viewership numbers on Rumble. Power Slap 11 attracted 4.3 million viewers, on a platform that averages only 50 million to 60 million monthly active users total.

“At the end of the day, this thing was built on the internet,” White says. “I already know the sport works; now it’s about delivering it to as many eyeballs as possible.”

YouTube boasts more than one billion monthly active users and, according to Nielsen data, accounted for 10.8% of all TV viewing in the United States in January. That share exceeds the figures for Netflix (8.6%); Disney’s trio of Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu (4.7%); and Amazon Prime Video (3.7%). It is also nearly half as large as broadcast TV’s combined share of viewership (22.5%).

The clear goal is to expose slapfighting to enough people over a long enough time that it desensitizes any who are outraged by the sport’s viciousness. It’s a gameplan that worked with the UFC, which was once considered “human cockfighting” but now has passed golf and hockey in both cultural relevance and media rights dollars.

In just two years, Power Slap has made progress. Hunter Campbell, the UFC’s chief business officer and a minority stakeholder in Power Slap, says the league has been legally sanctioned for fights in California, Florida, Louisiana, Nevada, Oklahoma and Texas and expects to add Missouri and New Jersey in the coming months. “Nobody has come close to that in two years, for a sport that did not exist,” he says.

The real moneymaker, though, will be hosting events overseas. White says Power Slap has a deal with Saudi Arabia to host four events this year and two in 2026, each paying $15 million in site fees, plus comparable deals in Abu Dhabi and Qatar. He also hopes to expand to Brazil and South Africa in the near future.

White remains adamant that Power Slap can, and will, one day be as big as the UFC—which is why he and his primary business partners, former UFC owners Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta and The Ultimate Fighter producer Craig Piligian, have no desire to give up their near-total control of the product.

“I don’t like to have to answer to anybody,” White says. “We built the business however we see fit. We do whatever the f— we want.”