MMA Fighting reports that Bellator’s “Fightmaster” on SpikeTV saw an increase in its ratings for Episode number 3. The show this past Thursday drew an average of 676,000 viewers.
After taking the week off for the Fourth of July holiday, the show was back and viewers remembered.
Episode 3: 676,000 viewers
Via MMA Fighting:
Most of the growth has come in the Male 18-34 demo, which started at a shockingly low 0.3 the first week, grew to a 0.4 the second week, and rose all the day to 0.73 for the third episode.
Notably, Cops was the lead-in for Fightmaster which went back to back as it played the second episode before the new episode. Also, Bellator 360 featuring knockouts played after Episode 3. Fightmaster competed with FX’s new original drama, “The Bridge” which debuted on the network Wednesday night.
Payout Perspective:
The ratings are still below the average for Spike TV primetime programming which is between 700K-850K according to the article. Yet, its a pleasant incline in ratings which bucks the previous trend set by TUF which either declined each episode or stayed about the same. I had criticized Fightmaster for taking last week off as it would have stalled any momentum. I was wrong. Perhaps the format of the show is peaking the interest of viewers. Hopefully for Bellator, it can continue to grow its audience.
That’s about a fifty percent increase in ratings. Let’s see if they can keep it up. Although I expect the ratings to be all over the map just like bellator events.
You’re still right. Taking a week off is not good for building consistent viewership.
Tito Ortiz going to Bellator?
The transition is starting
I agree with Sampson. The ratings were so far below what anyone expected. They couldn’t really get any worse. So an increase isn’t really a sign of a week off not having an effect. It wasn’t a good idea. But at the same time. There really wasn’t very many fans to be effected or turned off by the week off. So there wasn’t a whole lot of risk involved. At the rate they were going they were tampering with a program that was doomed to be canceled if things didn’t improve. It would have been a horrible idea if the show was doing 1 million plus viewers. But not 500K.
As for the show. The ratings were a good up tick. Even though they are extremely low still and still at a point that will get them to not have a second season. BUt anytime you increase ratings that much over 3 weeks. You cant say anything bad about them. So Props to Bellator!
My opinion of the show…The fighters I have seen were very poor. There was a couple that might be average fighters. But the rest of the fighters were just very bad. even worse is the fights were stack with even worse bums to provide very fast finishes. So the fighters were designed to show off the winner and they still looked very poor.
Thus far. I think the most exciting aspect of the show, and is now over, was the coach interaction and fighter selection. Watching the banter as they 1 upped each other for fighters was pretty amusing. But from my understanding. I don’t think the coaches will be interacting much from this point out. So that is gone. So all we have is them coaching poor talent and having them fight each other. I don’t think the show will be as interesting to me from this point forward. But we will see I guess.
I was glad to see a fighter ask a question that I was telling my friends would be my concern. I said straight up there is really only 2 coaching choices. Randy and Jackson. Frank Shamrock is outdated and teachings are not good enough. Joe Warren isn’t rounded enough how have any history of coaching anyone. But my concern was how much time would Couture or Jackson dedicate to training these guys. Couture is to busy trying to be a movie star and find wife number 15 to spend any time with these guys. Jackson has real work champs that depend on him and he cant be wasting time with cans in Bellator.
So these guys are getting half assed training either way imo. But at least someone asked them if they were going to be spending anytime with them. Jackson admitted he had others to teach but would be there off and on. Couture claimed to be commited. Frank of course said he had nothing better to do.
I really hope the upcoming live event will draw.
I like any positive trend in MMA viewership, but I put this show on the same shelf that I put TUF – the “don’t really need to watch this” shelf.