Bellator 101 last Friday night drew an average of 649,000 viewers on Spike TV.
While that’s down 51,000 viewers from the previous week it’s still a reasonably solid audience for a Friday night event and both Bellator and Spike TV will take heart from the fact that the main event, which saw Joe Warren defeat Nick Kirk, was watched by 932,000 viewers – the highest peak rating for the promotion this season.
All this has to be taken in relative terms of course. On one hand 649,000 viewers is good given how rough a start to the ninth season Bellator experienced just a few weeks ago, while on the other, the fact that on average the audience has declined rather than increased compared to last season isn’t exactly ideal.
Meanwhile, rumors emerged in the last week that despite it’s sub-par ratings in it’s debut season, the ‘Fight Master’ reality show had been given the greenlight for a second series.
However, Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney has now stated that is not the case and that at this stage no decision has been made on the show’s future. Of course it won’t be Rebney’s decision either way – that will lie firmly in the hands of Viacom.
For the time being he indicated that he’s focused on the promotion’s upcoming live events, in particular their pay-per-view event on November 2nd, and understandably so as they’ve really put themselves out of their usual comfort zone with that particular endeavour and they’ll want all hands on deck to make sure that both the build-up and the actual event itself goes as smoothly as possible.
Bellator Season 9 Ratings So Far:
Bellator 98: 437,000 viewers
Bellator 99: 660,000
Bellator 100: 700,000
Bellator 101: 649,000
