Monday night’s Countdown to UFC 104 drew an average viewership of 524,000 on Spike TV, which is below the yearly average of 676,000 and also below last year’s average of 613,000.
Interestingly, the program has experienced a material drop in its ratings over the past three months:
| 2009 | |
| 95 | 632,000 |
| 96 | 703,000 |
| 97 | 774,000 |
| 98 | 774,000 |
| 99 | 552,000 |
| 100 | 1,720,000 |
| 101 | 805,000 |
| 102 | 523,000 |
| 103 | 382,000 |
| 104 | 524,000 |
Payout Perspective:
There seems to be some concern around the MMA community that the UFC won’t be able to sustain the torrid pace that it set earlier in the year with some extremely solid programming and PPV events. UFC 102 and 103 were underwhelming both in terms of buyrate and live gate, and the Countdown shows have also failed to knock everyone’s socks off.
Additionally, Dave Meltzer pointed out last week that the UFC has been offering a lot of free tickets lately – which is a nice gesture – but also a possible symptom of a general lack of interest in up-coming shows.
On The Ultimate Fighter on 10/7, there was commercial after commercial plugging the 10/24 PPV with the tag line about following Dana White on Twitter to get free tickets for the Staples Center show. We went from Montreal and Las Vegas shows advertising no tickets available to going on the national TV commercial talking about free tickets. They are papering heavily in the market. Last week when White made a public appearance, at first they were going to give away one ticket to everyone who came to see White. UFC gave away the tickets and got contact info and have offered those who came to see White two free tickets. Right now they’ve sold more than 8,000 tickets for $1.6 million, but that’s less than half the place.
However, the truth of the matter is that the UFC could have never expected to maintain the pace it had set earlier in the year.
Not only has much of the UFC’s early-year momentum faded away – momentum due to the video game and centennial event – but the events themselves aren’t nearly as attractive in terms of headliners.
There are so many factors that feed into the success or relative “failure” of an event, but it all starts with the calibre of your headline events and what’s on the line: it’s cards like GSP-Penn II (800k) that sell relative to Rampage-Jardine (350k ) or Penn-Florian and Griffin-Silva (850k) that sell relative to Franklin-Belfort (375k).
The challenge for the UFC moving forward is to not only put those types of match-ups together, but ensure that it has the capability to do so with an adequate number of talented and popular fighters.
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Lyoto Machida has a good shot at becoming that next popular fighter if he can defeat Shogun Rua this weekend; and, given the response he received in Brazil after returning home last May, he could be even more valuable to the UFC internationally than domestically.
I agree that the main events play a huge role. If Jackson/Evans was still happening, they would be closing out the year with two events that would have a good shot at one million buys.
Feb/March will see some strong buys as better match-ups occur. The same thing happened earlier this year when they had a couple of soft months. The number of events the UFC puts on pretty much ensures periods of lackluster events.