Bellator 116 took place on Friday night at the Pechanga Resort and Casino in Temecula, California and Blagoi Ivanov advanced to the heavyweight tournament with a submission victory over Lavar Johnson in the main event.
According to Nielsen sources, Bellator 116’s preliminary live viewership landed at 572,000 total viewers with 305,000 of that coming from the adult 18-49 demographic.
This number is down 30% versus last weeks Bellator 115, which drew 828,000 viewers. The peak viewership showed a modest increase to 782,000 viewers (10:16PM).
With the viewership from Friday night, the average audience of this season is now down below 700,000 to 692,000, but still above the season nine Friday night average of 652,000.
When it came to the competition on cable, Bellator went up against WWE Smackdown on SyFy, which drew its usual 2.7 million viewers and some Master coverage on ESPN, which drew right around 762,000 viewers.
The preliminary television ratings for this season of Bellator are below.
Bellator 110: 880,000
Bellator 111: 653,000
Bellator 112: 699,000
Bellator 113: 507,000
Bellator 114: 711,000
Bellator 115: 828,000
Bellator 116: 572,000
Stay with TheMMAReport.com for ongoing coverage of the Nielsen ratings battle between Bellator MMA and the UFC.