The Arizona State Boxing Commission has released fighter payouts for Strikeforce Challenger 10. Miesha Tate ($18,000) and Joe Riggs ($15,000) were the top earners of the event. In total, Strikeforce paid out $53,250 in disclosed payouts.
Note: that the money reported below is only the money required to be reported by the commission.
Courtesy of MMAJunkie.com:
Main Event
Joe Riggs: $15,000 def. Louis Taylor: $2,000
Main Card:
Miesha Tate: $18,000* def. Hitomi Akano: $4,900#
Ryan Couture: $3,000 def. Lucas Stark: $1,000
Hitomi Akano: (see above) def. Carina Damm: $2,100
Miesha Tate: (see above) def. Maiju Kujala: $1,750
Liz Carmouche: $2,000 (includes $1,000 win bonus) def. Colleen Schneider: $1,000
Under Card:
Chris Gruetzemacher: $2,000 (includes $1,000 win bonus) def. Ryan Diaz: $500
Jason Richey def. Edmund Xehili^
Joel Champion def. Sean Scott^
Rob Anderson def. Alonzo Fears^
Andres Acuna def. Edwin Louis^
Frankie Saenz def. Jace Crawford^
+ – $8,000 ($4,000 to show/$4,000 win bonus) for semis and $10,000 ($5,000/$5,000) for finale
# – $2,800 for semis ($1,400/$1,400) and $2,100 for finale
^ – Amateur bout
MMAJunkie also reports that Strikeforce Challengers 10 ratings peaked with 280,000 Showtime viewers. Overall, the show averaged 237,000 viewers and remarkably, the peak audience was recorded during the Colleen Schneider vs Liz Carmouche reserve bout, though it most likely received a bump in viewership due to those tuning in to see the main event and the tournament finale bout.
These numbers are good enough to fall behind Strikeforce Challengers 7 (316,000 viewers due to the free preview weekend) and Strikeforce Challengers 8 (249,000 viewers). These Challenger events continue to do well for Strikeforce as they continue to land around or above the 200,000 viewership number, which was something unheard of for Challenger events when they started airing the events on Showtime last year.
SF seems to be hitting their stride with their Challengers cards. They are solid cards with competitive fights, and we are finally starting to see fighters “graduate” to the Saturday cards – which is the point of the Challengers series. Again, we’re not sure how Showtime measures success, but it seems like they are happy with the numbers they are getting from these shows – and remember that for Showtime, the number they care about is total viewership: live + DVR + replays + OnDemand.
And the commentating is getting much better – I like the Mauro, Quadros & Miletich combo in the booth.
I would be really curious to see the trending of the showtime boxing events versus the mma events. Are they both growing or is mma eating into the boxing viewers?
I really wish they did more challengers cards but because of the monthly pay model that is unlikely to happen.
SF must make a good profit off these challengers,with showtime giving them a 300k to make these events
jv:
From my research, the big Showtime boxing bouts can get anywhere between 600k to 1.2 mill viewers on average, their smaller shows like ShoBox get similar numbers to the Challenger events, 200K-300K. This was the case last year, not sure if anything has changed since.
jv,
Thanks for those numbers, that’s something that I’ve wondered about for a while. I doubt those numbers have changed much, maybe just an uptick to reflect the increase in subscribers (if any).
I’m guessing Showtime got a boost in subscribers when SF signed the deal with them. I know I never had it before and I signed up as soon as I heard. Showtime should be treating those as incremental sales – those people (me included) enjoy Showtime’s other offerings, but really they pay for the MMA.