This past weekend Bellator MMA finished up the move to Friday nights with another successful fight card. Overall the season itself had some ups-and-downs, especially on the television viewership and rating side, but in the end kept everyone entertained and certainly compelled to see what’s next.
Now, speaking of viewership and ratings, I am seeing a tremendous amount of people saying that overall the season had “strong” ratings. Certainly, the term strong can be used 100-different ways, but it got me thinking, were the television ratings and viewership numbers for season nine strong or would a different term suffice? Let’s slice-and-dice the viewership numbers down a bit, before we try to answer that question.
Season Nine By The Numbers:
- Full Season Live Average = 671k
- Friday Night Only Average = 652k
- Saturday Night Only Average = 768k
- Live+3 DVR (B99-B108 only) Average = 766k
- Live+3 DVR (B99-B108 only) Increase Average = 11%
- Live+3 DVR (Friday only) Increase Average = 11%
Season Eight By The Numbers:
- Full Season Live Average = 792k
- Live+3 DVR Average = 850k
- Live+3 DVR Increase Average = 7%
Season Eight vs. Season Nine Quick Compare:
- Season nine saw an overall 15% viewership drop on the live side, compared to season eight.
- Season nine saw a 17% viewership drop on the live side (when you minus the converted PPV) , compared to season eight.
- Season nine saw an overall 4% increase on the DVR side, compared to season eight.
- Season nine’s most-watched live show (minus the converted PPV) was 793k vs 938k (-15%).
- Season nine’s least-watched live show (minus the Saturday premiere) was 520k vs 705k (-26%).
- Season nine only hit above 700k live viewers (minus the converted PPV) twice, every single season eight fight card drew above 700k.
After you take all of this in, let’s not forget about the big (and obvious) difference between the two seasons – the day/time change.
Certainly, one can argue that a Thursday night (late night) is better than a Friday night (half primetime), but this shift in day/time was a Spike TV decision based off several factors including market research and head-to-head competition (especially Thursday Night Football on the NFL Network). So clearly Spike TV had to know going in that they were going to see a viewership and ratings drop, but able to be sustainable in the longer-term.
Anyway, back to the numbers, clearly the glaring number that pops out is the 15%-17% viewership drop from season-to-season. Especially when you factor in that the entire season eight season was above 700k viewers on the live side. Again, not necessarily a surprising drop here, but certainly something that cannot be ignored regardless of the day/time.
Speaking of Friday night shows, I do want to point out something Bellator MMA Chairman and CEO Bjorn Rebney said to TheMMAReport.com the other day (full interview here), “There is that thing in TV that Friday night is where TV shows go to die and we knew going into it would’t be the case, we knew going into it we would hit great numbers, we would put on great events, we would hit a million-plus viewership numbers on an ongoing basis.”
Rebney would certainly be accurate with the beginning of that statement if he was talking about Fight Master or a random Fox sitcom struggling on a Wednesday night, being moved to a Friday night, but when it comes to live sports that notion is just flat-out wrong and really can’t be used here to tout the ratings.
MLB, NBA, Nascar, College Football/Basketball and even the NHL offer up live sports on a Friday night – including playoff and championship games. To say Friday night is dead-night is certainly accurate for most, but for live sports? I don’t think so.
Furthermore, Rebney ended that statement with the talk of a million-plus viewership numbers on an ongoing basis, which isn’t exactly true. In reality, the only reason they eclipsed a 1 million viewer live average for a show was that they were forced to convert a PPV to a Saturday night free show. Don’t get me wrong, I am not knocking Bellator 106’s 1.1 and 1.2 million numbers, but anything less than that for the converted PPV would have been a failure. Not to mention, there was zero chance that PPV would have been seen by a million eyes anyway, so converting it was definitely the right move.
Now, I know some of you are saying, what about the peak numbers? What about Beltran and Rampage hitting 1.2 million viewers? What about Marshall and Shlemenko hitting just over a million viewers?
Well, simply put, peak numbers, are just peak numbers. In reality, they offer little to the overall viewership number (especially when they are only a sliver of a quarter hour), are rarely used to be able to pull in advertisers and if you haven’t noticed, no one else really even publishes them. Think about it, when was the last time MLB, NBA, NHL or even the UFC offered up its peak numbers.
Sure, technically, Bellator hit a million viewers a couple of times when you factor in the peaks, but at the end of the day, that is not really what the advertisers focus on and not necessarily a measurement of the overall seasons success. Bellator 108 was the perfect example of this, that card had an average of just under 800k viewers and peaked at 1.2 million viewers (~50% difference in viewership).
The way I look at that is, sure that is a great number, and a great increase, but what happened the rest of the night? Where were all the viewers from 9:00 p.m. – 10:45 p.m.? How come the spike in viewers didn’t help the following weeks show average (12% drop week-to-week)? Seriously, if a million people watched 15 minutes of a fight and sub-800 stuck around for the rest of the card is that good? Is that strong? I will leave that up to you to decide.
With all that said, can we safely say Bellator’s numbers were “strong” this season? Sure, if you really want, but I believe the numbers paint the picture that Bellator’s Friday night performance was a little lower then expected on the average side and Bellator and SpikeTV will certainly do everything they can to push season ten into the consistent 700-800k viewership range they hit before.
Lastly, with Bellator finding a home and niche market on Friday nights, and with Glory starting to develop viewers on Saturday nights, Spike TV is once again becoming a force to be reckon with in the Combat Sports game. The biggest question I have for them (and Bellator) going forward is, how are they going to keep growing and keep us all entertained? We will all just have to tune-in to find out!