MMA Payout has learned that the re-air of UFC 165 scored an average of 449,000 viewers on FS1. On Spike TV, the first of a three part documentary on Rampage Jackson leading up to the Bellator PPV received 404,000 viewers.
Last month’s PPV featured the five round fight between Jon Jones and Alexander Gustafsson.
The Rampage documentary, “Rampage 4 Real” followed TNA Wrestling which earned an average of 1.1 million viewers. Thus, the show lost more than half of the TNA audience.
The NFL (Seahawks vs. Cardinals) ruled the night on cable with an average of over 6 million viewers according to TV By the Numbers. ESPN College Football (Miami vs. UNC) earned an average of over 2.1 million viewers. The MLB Playoffs on Fox did the best of the live sports as it received 8.6 million viewers.
Payout Perspective:
The re-air of the PPV fared better than the usual non-live sports programming on FS1 Thursday nights. It was a good opportunity for fans to watch a recent PPV for free. The Rampage documentary averaged about the same as the re-air but did not do well if you compare the audience to the amount of viewers that tuned in for TNA Wrestling prior to the show. This is disappointing considering Rampage was cross-promoted on TNA. We will see how the rest of the documentary goes and if it picks up viewership as we near November 2nd.
Que the Bjorn propaganda talking points about how half of their Main Event PPV headliner drew as many eyeballs for a documentary as Jon Jones PPV for the UFC head to head.
Doubt this will translate into buys. Is anyone gonna miss Bellator?
The only MMA organization that died that I don’t miss is YAMMA Pit Fighting.
Bellator is a great league, when they go down MMA will be less interesting.