The Sports Business Journal reports that Fox Sports will have programming on Saturday night prime time for the next 28 of 32 weeks. This will include NASCAR, Major League Baseball, College Football as well as the UFC on Fox
The UFC will only cover 3 of the next 28 Saturday night events for Fox on Saturday nights. But, the overall strategy for Fox to air sports in prime time will boost ad sales and attract advertisers that would not usually purchase time during sports programming.
At this point, there has been no pushback from local affiliates that may have its own time cut into due to sports overrun.
Payout Perspective:
While the UFC will play a small part in the Saturday night prime time strategy, it’s the possibility of drawing advertisers that do not traditionally buy into sports that could be intriguing for the UFC. It is the intent of Zuffa and Fox to attract more mainstream sponsors for its programming and the ownership of Saturday night programming by Fox Sports should help. With the further exposure into prime time for the UFC, it can only mean a better possibility of attracting mainstream sponsors.
It will be interesting to see how the UFC ratings on FOX stack up to a maintstream sporting event counterpart.
If it does higher ratings than Nascar, MLB, or college football, they are in the money for sure.
Lower and we’ll see some probs.