MMAPayout will be covering in detail the FOX – UFC TV deal, quarterly and weekly, in order to analyze the performance of both properties throughout the lifespan of the TV deal. In this week’s edition, we will be looking at the UFC on FOX sports network ratings for the week of 11/25 – 12/01.
UFC on Fox Sports 1 Wednesday Night Block (11/27):
– UFC Tonight: 156,000 viewers.
– UFC Unleashed: 285,000 viewers
– The Ultimate Fighter (repeat): 216,000 viewers
– The Ultimate Fighter (new episode): 635,000 viewers
UFC on Fox Sports 1 Saturday (11/30):
– Big 12 College Football (lead-in for TUF Prelims): 464,000 viewers.
– The Ultimate Fighter Finale Prelims: 938,000 viewers.
– The Ultimate Fighter Finale Main : 1.129M viewers.
Other Key Programming Notes :
– The Ultimate Fighter Live Weigh-ins (11/29) on FS2 drew 31,000 viewers.
– Ultimate Insider (11/26) on FS2 drew 7,000 viewers.
– The Ultimate Fighter Finale Prelims (11/30) on FS2 (FS1 delay due to CFB): 109,000 viewers.
– Golden Boy Boxing (11/26) on FS1 drew 263,000 viewers.
– PAC-12 College Football (11/29) on FS1 drew 2.179M viewers.
***
Fox Sports 1 & 2 Weekly Totals:
– Fox Sports 1 Primetime Viewership: 514,000 (last week: 289,000)
– Fox Sports 2 Primetime Viewership: 14,000 (last week: 9,000)
Ratings provided by Nielsen TV Ratings & Fox Sports.
Payout Perspective:
It looks like Fox Sports 1 has something to be very thankful for this week, which just happens to be Thanksgiving weekend. The PAC-12 Friday night CFB game drew an eye-popping 2.179M viewers, which was followed up by the TUF Finale UFC event which pulled 938K viewers for the prelims and a remarkable 1.129M viewers for the main card. The TUF Finale main card marks the first time the UFC has gone beyond 1M viewers since the debut show back in August. The UFC had 3 of the top 5 most watched FS1 programs for the week.
TUF rebounded with an increase of viewership of 25% (635,000) from the previous week to finish culminate the season by averaging 639,000 viewers for the 13 episodes. With NASCAR wrapping up, the UFC, CFB, and CBB have so far done a great job at rebounding this week. Now with TUF over and no weekly Wednesday night fights on FS1, it will be interesting to see what the viewers will do from here on out. There is an UFN coming up today (Friday) and UFC 168 coming up to close-off the year, so observing the MMA viewer behavior during this downtime should give us some insight on whether the network can retain the MMA fan during the TUF off-season.
The Pac-12 football game ratings are proof that people have no problem finding the channel — when they want to.
Love this series. Lot of great information.
This is a great series. Really enjoy these, Jose. I don’t know why there wasn’t any more buildup to the Tarver fight, 45 or not. I saw like two commercials for it. I wonder what these Golden Boy shows do normally. 75-100k? If not for Fox, HOW would they/did they make money and keep alive??
OK I just realized my last question was dumb (with the PPV biz and all), but my original point stands. These shows are held in ballrooms holding a few hundred people and are watched by a few thousand on TV. If they’re paying the fighters anything more than 1k…take in all the production/crew costs and whatever the local and state governments rape them for, and I can’t understand how it’s a viable business platform at all. It must hemorrhage money like the WNBA.
@assassin, @AK:
Appreciate the feedback guys.
@AK:
Golden Boy shows normally do around 100K-160K viewers.