UPDATED 9/20 – The third episode of The Ultimate Fighter 18: Rousey vs Tate took place last night on Fox Sports 1 to decreased Nielsen ratings.
According to Nielsen sources, the preliminary overnight rating for episode 3 landed at 639k. Last night’s episode saw a 26% drop from last weeks show, which landed at 870k total viewers.
The episode just barely cracked the top 100 cable shows for the night and got destroyed by basically everything in the 10 p.m. EST time slot. It should be noted though, that Wednesday is a joke night at 10 p.m. anyway, since Duck Dynasty (over 9.4 million viewers) even beats the major networks in overall viewership and the demographic ratings, so you simply cannot expect the UFC to compete with them.
Furthermore, FS1’s biggest competition is the competing sports networks right now, such as ESPN, NBCSN and CBS, and the UFC clearly beat all of them. ESPN only mustered one single show in the top-100 and that was PTI at 5:30 p.m. EST. The rest didn’t even register on the scales, so it is safe to say, that even though this number was a decline and not great, the UFC still manages to beat out the four letter network.
As always stay tuned for all the updated UFC and Bellator television ratings right here on TheMMAReport.com