Bellator 106 took place on Saturday night at the Long Beach Arena in Long Beach, California and Eddie Alvarez regained the Bellator lightweight title with a split decision victory over Michael Chandler.
According to Nielsen sources, Bellator 106’s preliminary viewership landed at a new Spike TV Bellator record of 1.1 million viewers with a peak of 1.4 million viewers.
The peak for the live card came at the 11:17 p.m. ET mark and reached its high mark with Men 18-49 with a 1.1 rating for the Alvarez-Chandler bout.
Overall, the telecast ranked #2 in all of cable for its time-slot with men 18-49 and is the most watched MMA show on television this fall (Sept 1 – Now).
It should also be noted that TheMMAReport.com got numerous complaints from fans who DVR’ed the broadcast and either completely missed the main-event or only got to watch half of it before it cut off. Now, this won’t impact the live+3 (DVR) number much, but it certainly won’t make viewers happy.
Thankfully, Spike TV has stepped up and is replaying the Chandler-Alvarez main event bout on Friday, November 8 at 8:00 p.m. ET/PT for all those who may have missed out.
Comparatively, the last time Bellator tried out a Saturday night, they landed at an extremely low 437,000 total viewers, further proving that big-ticket cards will always draw more than anything else.
When it came to the last Bellator Friday night show it also landed at a very low 512,000 total viewers, however the overall Friday night season average is remains at 622,000 viewers.
When it came to the lead-in for this epic broadcast, Spike TV chose to offer a marathon of Cops. Cops has continued to be a great lead-in for Bellator offering multiple broadcasts of over 1 million and Saturday night was no different.
When it came to the competition, Bellator’s biggest challenge for viewership and demographic numbers was the in-state College Football game between FSU and Miami on ABC. The game drew an impressive 8.12 million viewers and a 2.6/9 rating. Fox also offered up a solid College Football matchup to make viewership tough for Bellator with a game between OSU and Texas Tech, which landed much lower at 2.43 million viewers and a 0.7/2 rating.
Overall, when I first heard Bellator was moving this card off PPV to Spike TV I was pretty nervous for them. Personally, I did not feel like there was enough time to shift the promotional and marketing schemes so that they could maximize the exposure of this, but that feeling was fairly mute when for the first time (to my knowledge) the hashtag #BellatorMMA was trending worldwide and delivering over 2,400 tweets per hour. Something that they have never done before and something that Bellator and SpikeTV should be proud of.
Sure, was Bellator ever going to reach 2-3 million viewers? No, but they did offer up a great ratings fight. Then again, it is going to take them getting away from major head-to-head match-ups with the likes of College Football in order to do even better.
Seriously, when you have 2 major College Football games drawing over 10 million combined viewers, it is hard to think Bellator could even crack the million mark. Something that going forward I truly believe SpikeTV and Bellator need to evaluate better, and that goes for PPV also.
Now for those of you who want to correlate these ratings to potential PPV buys, you just can’t. PPV buys and television ratings are two completely different animals. Just look at the UFC for example.
The UFC offered up supposedly “the best television card ever” back in August on Fox Sports 1 and could only reach about 1.7 million viewers. Comparatively, two PPV’s in the same month only drew a combined 440,000 buys (credit MMAPayout.com) so again, 440,000 vs 1.7 million isn’t exactly the same viewing audience.
Lastly, Bellator 106’s ratings whether SpikeTV feels are good or bad, it will not stop them from eventually putting on a full-fledged Bellator PPV. Personally though, if I am them, I am more focused on building a consistently higher Friday/Saturday rating average before I even think about dabbling in the PPV market.
Stay with TheMMAReport.com for ongoing coverage of the Nielsen ratings battle between Bellator MMA and the UFC.