Bellator 104 took place on Friday night in Iowa and the main card feature the semifinals of the season nine welterweight tournament as Rick Hawn and Ron Keslar advanced to the final.
According to Nielsen sources, Bellator 104’s preliminary viewership landed at 615,000 total viewers with a peak of 800k total viewers. The peak number took place at 9:14 p.m. ET, which was during the opening fight between Peter Graham and Eric Prindle.
Comparatively, last weeks number landed at a Friday night low of 539k total viewership number.
It should also be noted that Cops (889,000 total viewers) was the lead-in once again for Bellator and it was back in the top-100 cable shows. Last week it failed to make the cable top-100, so it is safe to say, Bellator can thanks Cops for the 14% viewer bump.
When it came to the competition, Bellator’s biggest challenge for viewership and demographic numbers was WWE’s Smackdown (2.64 million viewers) and the final game of the NLCS between the Cardinals and the Dodgers (6.073 million viewers).
Lastly, ESPN and SyFy both had solid bounce-back evenings, as both were riding four week declines in ratings. College Football on ESPN was up 63% (2.2 million) and WWE Smackdown was up 10% (2.64 million).
Stay with TheMMAReport.com for ongoing coverage of the Nielsen ratings battle between Bellator MMA and the UFC.