The Ultimate Fighter Live on FX drew 1.28 million viewers according to a press release provided by the UFC. The ratings won the new Friday night MMA wars at it did better than SpikeTV’s UFC’s Ultimate Fighter Fridays and MTV2’s Bellator 60 live event.
Via UFC press release:
The series debut of The Ultimate Fighter® Live on FX got off to a strong start Friday night (3/9/12, 9:00-11:38 PM) delivering 1.28 Million Total Viewers, 953,000 Adults 18-49 and 538,000 Adults 18-34, and ranking among the top five cable programs on Friday in Men 18-34 (#2), Adults 18-34 (#3), Men 18-49 (#4), and Adults 18-49 (#5)
The Ultimate Fighter® Live (9-11:38 PM ET) was up +58% in Adults 18-49, +96% in Men 18-49 and +124% in Men 18-34 vs. year ago time period.
Compared to other MMA telecasts on Friday evening, The Ultimate Fighter® Live Season 1 debut significantly outperformed Spike’s repeat counter-programming of The Ultimate Fighter® Season 10 by +189% in delivery of Adults 18-34, +162% among Adults 18-49, +208% with Men 18-34, and +167% in Men 18-49, and it also battered live MMA bouts on MTV2 by +703% in delivery of Adults 18-34, +947% among Adults 18-49, +568% with Men 18-34, and +842% in Men 18-49.
Payout Perspective:
Bear in mind that its the UFC press release, but the numbers show that TUF Live won the night of MMA. This can be attributed to the UFC and Fox marketing machines which hyped the show almost everywhere. Bellator 60 garnered just 169,000 viewers as the season premiere ratings are down from last season. Promising news for Bellator was that online streaming of its preliminary bouts on Spike.com were up 58 percent from season 5’s average. No numbers were given but we shall assume that its a sizable increase. It will be interesting to see how competitive (or lopsided) the MMA Friday night ratings will be over the next couple months.
I hate to open this can of worms again, but what does “Total Viewers” mean? Is that peak or average? Or is a viewer counted every time someone tunes in to even a portion of the show? I’m unsure of how the terminology is being used.
Diego,
Average viewers. I just updated the writeup to include a detailed rating breakdown.
Apparently the ratings dropped significantly as the broadcast continued.
If this thing doesn’t turn around soon, I’m sure FOX will drop the UFC like they’ve dropped thousands of other “promising” programs.
I dont think you can really gather much from this episode. IMO it is a bad idea to show all 16 fights to get in the house. They are meaningless fights. What i mean by that is the UFC or Fox have 16 guys they really like or are the best. They match them up verses the worst 16 guys so they gets the best guys on the show. If you add Cruz and Faber as 2 of the 16 they would never allow them to fight each other in this and one not make it on the show. The entire purpose of the fight to get in the house is not really to decide who gets in the house but the make sure the ones they want in the house will actually fight(something that was a problem in the past). So what you get is a ton of mismatches and fast finishes just like we had. But 16 fights takes for ever and no one wants to watch 2 1/2 hours of unknown fighters fight with no production value. So not suprised if viewers declined at some points. But the first episode is really still part of the audition process. The real TUF starts this week. With the new format it should be great and it wont be 2+ hours long.