MMA Junkie reports that Bellator 63 drew an average viewership of 140,000 viewers last Friday on MTV2. The ratings are down from last week’s 175,000 viewer showing and the season average of 151,000.
Bellator 63 brings down season 6’s average to 148,000 viewers.
Bellator 62: 175,000 viewers
Bellator 61: 108,000 viewers
Bellator 60: 169,000 viewers
Payout Perspective:
And the roller coaster ride for Bellator ratings continues. After a strong showing for Bellator 62, this past Friday’s showing declined by 35,000 viewers. Bellator ratings are truly hard to decipher considering last Friday it had to compete with March Madness and this week without NCAA basketball, viewership declined. In addition, TUF Live ratings were down as well this week.
With numbers so small the margin of error overwhelms any efforts to spot a real trend. At an average of 150K viewers per week, the margin of error is probably 40-50k – all these results fall within that.
40k viewers is a rounding error for TUF ratings (and most other shows) where they don’t report the number below hundreds of thousands. For Bellator we get fixated on a change of 30-40k that would go unnoticed in our analysis of any other show’s results.
The only trend I see is that they are not showing any growth. That’s bad.
Everyone who said Friday night would be bad for them was probably right. They did better last year going head to head with UFC on Saturdays. It’s a shame that they’re in the midst of some exciting tournaments and have title fights coming up and virtually no one an advertiser would care about is watching.
I’ve read that lots of Canadians are streaming it on spike.com or in other ways because it’s not on TV in large parts of Canada, but I have no idea if that’s true (or if it even matters). Bjorn talks about their various broadcast deals in other countries, but I don’t know how much they get for any international broadcast rights.
From an article on mmafighting.com the other day it sounds like they’ve got a healthy cash infusion from Viacom for production and crew travel, so maybe they’re just willing to tread water until the next phase on Spike. If nothing else, they’re building a library of videos for future use if and when they catch on with casual fans.
Bellator will not draw huge numbers in its current format.Fans don’t want to see weekly tournaments with no name fighters.The thing about a tournament is that anybody can win.When that happens you get (Duke vs.Bulter)an unlikely outcome.