The UFC 208 Prelims drew 824,000 viewers on FS1 Saturday night. The event aired from 8-10pm ET on Saturday preceding the PPV.
The event drew 420,000 viewers in the adult 18-49 demo per Sports TV Ratings. The show peaked at 1,046,000 viewers during the main fight of the telecast: Belal Muhammad’s win over Randy Brown.
Also of note related to UFC 208 programming, the weigh-ins drew just 80,000 viewers on FS1 from 6-7pm on Friday.
The pre-fight show on FS1 drew 259,000 viewers (142,000 in A18-49 demo) from 6:30-8pm ET. The post-fight show drew 207,000 viewers (111,000 in A18-49 demo) from 1:06-2:06amET.
Payout Perspective:
If you wanted to draw any parallels here, UFC 206 Prelims in December drew 777,000 viewers. 206 drew 150,000 PPV buys. UFC 204 in October drew 678,000 viewers and ended up with 290,000 PPV buys. While it’s not an exact science, the prelims have been used as one of the indicators for PPV buy rates. Realistically, it may mean the actual PPV does somewhere between 200-350K PPV buys. I would believe it being on the lower end of this.
Definitely not gonna be a good seller, show was horrible.
without superstar power, no matter which combat sport, thats probably the top these days….in order to break that ceiling, there needs to be a superstar name that brings in the casuals. If it were not for the “special” situation the UFC is in right now to be in a dire need to produce revenue I would say “good ppv”….these are not normal times for the UFC though.
Now we understand why Dana White is fighting McGregor tooth and nail to stay away from boxing and why they are trying to hard to get GSP to return, and why they paid to have Lesnar pop back in.
Not how things work today my man. Dana/Zuffa have to allow Conor to compete in whatever matchup Conor/Floyd are working on. If Conor just went and announced a fight with Floyd, the UFC would immediately take it to court and get an injunction that wouldn’t allow Conor to fight until the issue is settled, and if it did go to court then Zuffa would most likely win lawsuit to cancel whatever event they setup without Zuffa’s blessing. That’s why there is 3 parties in this negotiation, Floyd/Conor/Dana-Zuffa.
A player for the Lakers can’t go play on the Celtics for a night because they want to, they are under contract. Bo Jackson was one of the few exceptions but he also built those multi-sport stipulations into his contracts with the teams that allowed him to do both, but the teams also agreed to those terms.
Very true ken, and ufc would be subject to Ali act regulations if they promoted McTappers fight
This show probably beat every boxing ppv over the past 12 months. Haha.
Yeah since comparing a free show to a ppv is an accurate comparison lol
I was talking about the ppv, genius.