UFC women’s bantamweight Miesha Tate was wandering through the Las Vegas Fight Shop one day, browsing through their collection of MMA memorabilia, when she saw something that forced her to rethink her entire strategy when it came to fan interactions. It was a photo of her, signed by her, selling for $150, of which she would see not one single penny.

“That was kind of a wake-up call,” Tate told MMAjunkie. “I realized, OK, the guy that spent a half-hour waiting to catch me, got me to sign three or four things, now he’s making money off of it, and the Fight Shop is making money off of it, but the person who put all the work into making this possible – me – isn’t making a dime.”

At first, Tate said, it was annoying. Then she thought about all the fan mail she’d been receiving that would come with stacks of photos that the senders wanted her to sign and return, and soon her annoyance hardened into a firm resolve. No more, Tate announced on Twitter. She was done jumping through hoops for free so other people could make a quick buck.

She expected a little blowback from the people who made their money this way. She was even prepared for people to accuse her of being “stuck on myself, like I’m some hot commodity or something, which I’m not,” Tate said.

What she didn’t know was that these signed photos were just the tip of a much larger iceberg. And the people who were the intended customers in this vibrant, but seldom discussed market? Many of them were glad to see her taking this stand.

The Hustle

It’s a weird thing, when you think about it. People standing around in hotel lobbies for hours, all in the hope of getting a few seconds with some professional fighter, during which time they will ask that person to write their own name on an item – a photo, maybe, or a pair of MMA gloves – brought there for that sole purpose. What happens to the item after that depends on the person asking for the autograph.

“There’s two sides,” said Hermen Hernandez, an MMA autograph and memorabilia collector from New Jersey. “You’ve got the one side that are pure collectors, like I am. They do it for the love of it, because it’s a nice thing, whether you have a separate room in your house, a spot in the basement, or just a wall in your office to display it on, it’s just a nice thing to have this stuff. Then you’ve got the other side of it, to the frustration of the private collectors, which is the professional collectors, as I call them.”

The professionals are often people like the one UFC featherweight Conor McGregor can be seen interacting with on a recent episode of the UFC’s “Embedded” series on YouTube. Standing outside a Boston hotel with a bundle of photos, these entrepreneurial souls freely admitted that they planned to sell the items they were asking McGregor to autograph.

That was fine by McGregor, he explained later, since as he saw it they weren’t collecting autographs – “they’re collecting cash.”

“They go through the hustle of standing outside in the cold, getting the pictures printed, showing up,” McGregor said. “At the end of the day, they’re supporting the event. At the end of the day, they are fans of the show because they understand the fighters, they understand the pictures, they understand everything. So they’re fans, let them make a few quid.”

Except that, for one thing, the professionals aren’t necessarily fans, according to many in what is commonly referred to as the “graphing” (as in autographing) community.

“Half these guys who I’ve talked to, they don’t even really know the athletes,” said Hernandez. “They just work for someone who says, ‘OK, here’s a picture of who you need to get. Try to get as many as you can.’ That’s actually more common than you’d think.”

That claim was echoed by Shayne Smith, a collector from London, Ontario who is also an administrator of a Facebook group dedicated to MMA memorabilia and collectable items.

“Those people you see hounding Conor McGregor for autographs in that ‘Embedded’ video, just so they can sell them, those are people who most of us in the community despise,” Smith said. “We don’t want fighters to think that we’re all like that.”

To the collectors who do it for passion rather than profit, the professional “autograph hounds,” as they are often known, are a problem for two reasons. For one, they tend to be much more aggressive about getting multiple items signed, which can annoy fighters and drive them away before actual fans can even ask for a single autograph.

For another, their profiteering comes at the expense of the fighters, who inadvertently flood the market with a steady supply of autographed items, thus bringing down the value of their autographs at private signings.

That’s a real problem, according to Jason Bobbitt, owner of West Coast Authentic, which sells memorabilia and autographed items across all major sports. All of his MMA items for sale came via private signings, Bobbitt said, where fighters are paid a set fee to show up and sign autographs in bulk. When fighters do the same thing for free for people on the street, Bobbitt added, “it actually does hurt them, whether they realize it or not.”

“We’ll have people come into our store and want an autographed pair of Anderson Silva’s gloves and it’s, you know, $149,” Bobbitt said. “They’ll say, ‘Well, I can buy it on eBay for 40 bucks.’ But hey, I can buy lots of things on eBay. You don’t know if it’s real on eBay. You know it’s real here. We don’t sell any autograph hound stuff. All our stuff is paid for, which means the fighters got paid.”

It’s the same for A.J. Hiller, who started MMASignaturesUSA.com after leaving his longtime job as a store manager for Wal-Mart to follow his passion for mixed martial arts.

He used to dabble in memorabilia from all sports, Hiller said, but for his purposes MMA has a distinct advantage, since there’s no risk that athletes will be traded or lost to free agency, both of which can bring prices down on any items associated with their former teams. When he acquired a pair of shorts that UFC women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey wore in a Strikeforce bout, for instance, he didn’t have to worry that her move to the UFC would make them any less of a commodity (he eventually sold the shorts for around $3,500, he said).

According to Hiller, the people who collect autographs just to sell them on sites like eBay tend to give managers a skewed notion of what their fighter is worth.

“That’s kind of the wholesale market, as I see it,” Hiller said. “Items on eBay aren’t going for what they’re worth. You can find a Jon Jones signed glove for, say, $50. But in reality, Jon Jones will charge $75 for his autograph, so it’s not really a true representation of the price. Then you’ll have some managers who think that because they see a signed photo of their fighter online selling for $150, that means it must be worth that per signature. But you can put anybody’s autograph on the internet for $150. That doesn’t mean you’ll get $150.”

Posters and Profits

To understand how the market for these items works, and how that in turn affects the financial reality for MMA fighters, it helps to understand why people want this stuff in the first place. The person who walks into the Las Vegas Fight Shop and pays $150 for that photo of Tate with her signature scrawled across it, what has he bought, exactly? And how did he decide it was worth this much?

To some extent, it’s just like collecting anything else, whether it’s coffee tins or baseball cards. It’s collecting for collecting’s sake, that uniquely human drive to seek out and stockpile things, not for any practical or immediate use, but for the pleasure of the act itself. It’s a fun little detective game. It’s something to do.

But not all collectors are driven by the same motivations. Take Smith, for example, a 22-year-old Canadian who started out collecting Round 5 figures of his favorite MMA fighters, then branched out in search of other items after meeting fellow collectors through Facebook.

When he first started collecting signed photos, he did it by purchasing them online, mostly through eBay, inadvertently rewarding the autograph hounds he’d later come to loathe. He only did it this way because, as he put it, “I didn’t know how to get it myself.”

But the more immersed in the hobby he became, the more getting it himself became kind of the point.

“I’m a diehard MMA fan, and the appeal for me was the chance to meet the fighters and get autographs,” Smith said. “There’s two aspects to it. I like the art side of it, displaying the picture and putting it up on my wall. But definitely the experience of it is the best part. Nothing beats when you have a great interaction with a fighter and you have a great memory along with this thing to remember that by.”

Smith rarely sells the autographed items he acquires himself, he said, though he will occasionally trade with other collectors over the Internet. He also doesn’t like to pay to add new stuff to his collection anymore, though he does make an exception for one thing that even the most passionate collector can’t get without opening his wallet – signed UFC event posters.

The posters are a hot commodity for almost all collectors. They’re the only item that every collector I spoke to for this story has purchased at some point. It’s easy money for the UFC, since when the fighters first arrive in town on the week of the fight, as soon as they’ve checked into the hotel and sometimes even before the UFC has put them on the scale to check their weight, they’re hustled into a hotel ballroom to sign these posters.

It usually takes fighters 15 or 20 minutes, scribbling their name over and over again until every poster is signed (the UFC usually issues about 125 signed posters for each event, according to several collectors), after which fighters may never think about them again.

Collectors do, however. So does the UFC. It sells them at merchandise booths at the weigh-ins and at the events themselves, and prices usually range from around $150 to $200 or more. For particularly popular events, or ones featuring a number of big name fighters who have all autographed the same glossy paper, that price can go as high as $500 or more.

That adds up to a tidy sum for the UFC. In 2014 the UFC hosted 46 events. If it sold 125 posters at each one, and if those posters went for an average of $150 each (the low end of the spectrum, according to collectors), that’s $862,500 a year just for getting fighters to sit down and write their names. Factor in a few high-profile events, where the signatures on the posters can double or triple their price, and the gross take edges into seven figures.

The UFC also sells other autographed items on its online store, though it’s unclear whether fighters see a cut of the money it makes from signed posters and photos. A copy of the UFC’s merchandise agreement acquired by MMAjunkie promises the fighter 10 percent of “gross revenues” that Zuffa makes from “commercial exploitation” of “licensed merchandise,” but several fighters and managers maintained that fighters do not see any money from autographed poster or photo sales. The UFC did not respond to repeated requests for clarification on how that money is distributed.

According to Brian Butler-Au, who represents fighters like UFC women’s strawweight champion Carla Esparza and Felice Herrig through Sucker Punch Entertainment, certain aspects of the merchandise deal are “starting to pop up on the radar,” but autograph revenue still remains a low priority for many in the industry.

“The fighters don’t get a direct check for that type of stuff, but the UFC does other things to take care of the fighters,” Butler-Au said. “So it just depends how you look at it. If taking 20 minutes to sign some posters is part of the gig, hey, as long as it’s not some huge demand on their time or this windfall that the fighters are being cut out of, I don’t think that’s a problem.”

It’s a similar situation when it comes to fighters trying to extract money from fans for their autographs, Butler-Au said. While he’s arranged for his fighters to do private signings for a fee in the past, he worries that fighters who get overly concerned with who’s making money off their signature may ruin one of the best things MMA has going for it from a fan perspective.

“This is a fan-friendly sport,” Butler-Au said. “Part of the reason why it’s so popular is because fans can get close to the athletes. I’ve heard of fighters charging people for autographs when they meet fans, and I don’t think that’s the right approach. It’s too arrogant, at this point, for the size this sport is.”

One Person, Many Signatures

For Tate, the change in her autograph policy wasn’t driven by arrogance or even a concern that she was losing money, she said. Even if signing photos for fans brought down her price at private signings, “devaluing my signature is not my biggest concern,” she said.

Instead, it was about the demand on her time and the sense of entitlement that people seemed to feel about it, as if watching her on TV meant they deserved this slice of her attention, which is not insignificant, she said.

Every few days more mail arrives at her gym. There will be photos for her to sign, a letter instructing her on how to do it and what to write (autograph hounds try to avoid personalized autographs, since it makes them harder to sell, but some have developed techniques for removing personalizations or transferring autographs from one item to another), and a return envelope for her to send the items back.

Some of the mail may be from legitimate fans and not autograph merchants, said Tate, but it’s difficult to make that distinction through the mail.

“I think it’s kind of lame that it’s just expected of me to do this,” Tate said. “I try to give back to the fans as much as I can, show appreciation and love for them, but I don’t think there should be an expectation for me to spend a couple hours every Sunday signing stuff so other people can make money off of it.”

Already the economics of autographs have opened her eyes to a world she never knew existed. Like many pro athletes, Tate has developed two different signatures – one for fans and one for her own personal use in legal documents.

Some athletes have more than two signatures, memorabilia merchants such as Hiller said, since they like to have one version to give fans for free on the street, then another, better one for paid signings.

“When they’re getting paid for it, their autograph is a little bit nicer,” Hiller said. “In some cases it’s a lot nicer. I did a signing with Conor (McGregor) in Vegas for his last fight, when he fought (Dustin) Poirier, and we got a much better signature than what he was giving to people on the street. That brings value to the autograph.”

As for Tate’s attempt to shut down the autograph profiteers who prey on the kindness of fighters, Hiller is supportive. That’s at least in part because it helps professionals like him, who pay fighters to get what the autograph hounds want for free. But it’s also about basic fairness, he insisted.

“I think what Miesha is doing is the right thing, honestly,” Hiller said. “There are the hardcore fans who just want to go and meet Miesha and get their picture taken with her and keep that photo as their own souvenir, but then there are the people who want dozens of pictures autographed. But you know they’re not going to plaster dozens of pictures of her up in their house, unless they’re total freaks or something. What they’re trying to do is make a profit. And if they’re making a profit, Miesha should be getting a piece of that. The only reason they’re making money is because she made herself into a celebrity.”

Then again, according to collectors like Hernandez, who primarily collects signed gloves, any attempt to shut down autograph profiteers risks destroying the accessibility that makes the hobby so fun for fans of MMA. One of the things he likes about seeking autographs from fighters as opposed to athletes in other major sports is the personal interaction. It’s why the only signed gloves he’s ever purchased rather than collecting himself were for those few MMA stars who are notoriously difficult for fans to get to, such as Georges St-Pierre and Brock Lesnar.

“As someone who’s just there as a fan and a collector, you know, I just want one thing signed,” Hernandez said. “I want a glove, maybe a picture with an athlete. And it does become more difficult to be a casual fan and casual collector, because now you’re competing with the professionals on both sides, but the fighters are becoming jaded about the whole process. They’re becoming what you see in the NFL and in Major League Baseball.”

It’s the same for Smith, the Round 5 figurine enthusiast turned photo collector. He’s seen the autograph hounds pestering fighters for dozens of autographs at a time, all for items that they clearly intend to sell, “and the fighters are usually nice enough to do it, and I’m really surprised some of them do, because they’re really just getting taken advantage of,” he said.

But then, he’s also seen St-Pierre whoosh by autograph seekers and genuine fans. He understands why, he said. It must get tiresome to deal with that intensity of attention. Fighters must get to a point where they dread those packs of people with pens and photos ready, especially when they can’t tell who’s just there to make a buck off them.

“On the flip side, there’s been so many times where I had a great interaction with a fighter and I instantly became such a fan of that fighter and wanted to watch them even more,” Smith said. “When the fighter takes the time to really interact with the fans and make it a good experience, it can make you a fan for life of that person.”