MMA Payout has learned from Spike TV sources that Friday’s Bellator 99 received an average viewership of 660,000 with its peak at 809,000 viewers during its main event. An immediate replay scored an average of 435,000 viewers.
The total viewership was 1,095,000 on Friday night.
Bellator 99 represents a bump from Bellator 98 of 437,000 viewers. Notably, WWE’s Smackdown on Syfy received an average viewership of 2.8 million for a 0.9 rating according to Television By Numbers.
Payout Perspective:
The ratings reflect the fact that Friday night may be a difficult night to compete with the WWE. Its immediate replay almost matched Bellator 98’s viewership. We shall see how Bellator does in the weeks to come.
Isn’t that quite good for first friday’s event?
Yeah, it’s kind of good if you are really wanting a pink slip.
Is that you ace? the company man!
Nah, it’s just that with all the talk about how friday is a dead day for TV, and frequent changes (first event saturday, then friday, with no major headliner) I kinda expected this event to did really bad numbers.
660 is somewhat average number – which is quite good – for my expectations.
BTW: This is the first time I noticed, that they do Bellator – and immediate Bellator replay on Fridays. 2x times in one night. Seems crazy to me (but viewership for the second one is interestingly solid). Is something like that common practice in US TV industry? (I’m from Europe, and do event and replay one after another is basically unimaginable for TV stations here)
Wow… it looks like Bellator is beating the once-almighty TUF these days.
The latest TUF episode came in at 639,000 viewers and 0.3 rating, not apples to apples but still.