WEC 52, held Nov. 11th, featuring Urijah Faber versus Takeya Mizugaki garnered a 0.57 household rating and an average audience of 570,000 viewers on Versus.
In addition to the household ratings and the average viewers, MMA Junkie reports that WEC 52 scored a 0.79 with men 18-49. Versus held pre and post fight shows in support of the second to the last WEC event.
Payout Perspective:
The numbers are impressive considering it was the same night as good NBA (Heat/Celtics) and NFL (Falcons/Ravens) games. If there is one thing that you could conclude when looking at the impressive rating is that Urijah Faber was the reason. He will be a big draw in the UFC and should headline events. Faber is marketable (e.g., his commercials, shown during WEC 52, with Kenny Powers are hilarious) and showed he is a good fighter. It will be interesting to see which weight division he decides to fight in with the UFC.
As soon as WEC starts catching up with casual MMA fans, it gets enveloped by the UFC. I really enjoy the WEC cards, one more to go…
In addition to Faber, you have to credit the UFC-WEC merger with generating some new interest in the WEC among the current MMA fan base.
It’s also for that reason that I’m not sure it’s fair to say the WEC is finally starting to catch up with casual MMA fans. If you remember, the WEC was scoring consistently higher ratings in the latter half of 2008 and all of 2009 as compared to 2010. In the grand scheme of things this 570,000 viewers is still lower than the ~650k that Urijah did while fighting Assuncao at the beginning of this year and less than any of his other fights in previous years.
Thank you for being consistent with your posting of ratings no matter what they are.
It seems like a lot of other sites pick and choose which ratings results to post based on if they can turn it into a story or not. I like that you post them here all the time no matter what.