Bellator 117 took place on Friday night at the Mid-America Center in Council Bluffs, Iowa and the card was headlined by Douglas Lima winning the vacant welterweight title with a second round stoppage victory over Rick Hawn.
According to Nielsen sources, Bellator 117’s preliminary live viewership landed at 617,000 total viewers and this is up 7 percent from last week’s preliminary viewership number of 572,000.
The peak of the broadcast came during the main event between Lima and Hawn with 913,000 viewers. This is the fourth time that the peak has been over 900,000 and this peak number is up 16 percent from last week’s peak of 782,000.
With the viewership from Friday night, the average audience of this season is now 683,000 and this is 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 2.757 million viewers and American Dad on Adult Swim won the night with 2.004 million viewers at 10:30 p.m. ET.
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
Bellator 117: 617,000
Stay with TheMMAReport.com for ongoing coverage of the Nielsen ratings battle between Bellator MMA and the UFC.