ONE Championship MMA: A New Era drew 176,000 viewers Monday night on TNT for the replay of its Tokyo event this past weekend per Nielsen. The event was also available live on the B/R App live.
Demetrious Johnson and Eddie Alvarez made their promotional debuts on the card. Johnson earned a second round submission over Yuya Wakamstsu. However, Alvarez was upset falling to Russian Timofey Nastyukhin. The event featured four championship fights and the actual card was condensed for the televised version on TNT.
The event in Tokyo was the first of ONE’s expansion after it had signed Alvarez, Johnson, Sage Northcutt and Vitor Belfort flexing its new financial muscle to raise its profile, especially in the United States.
Payout Perspective:
It was the first telecast under the Turner television deal and hopefully it gets a better time slot than 11:45pm on the east coast. This telecast did not do well because it wasn’t live and the replay was on at a poor time slot on a Monday night. Hopefully, programming will do better to help ONE succeed by not only letting it air on its B/R App but also during good time slots on the network.
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