The Ultimate Fighter 19 episode 2 drew an average of 320,000 viewers on FOX Sports 1 this past Wednesday night.
That’s a terrible number, down 275,000 viewers from the premiere and marking it as the least watched episode for main ‘Ultimate Fighter’ show ever.
The show was up against NBA play-offs this week, but even so it shows just how far the long-running reality show has fallen from it’s heyday on Spike TV when it would pull 1.5-2 million viewers per episode.
It’s not hard to see why as the UFC have really run the TUF series into the ground over the past few years.
Even when they were first signing to FOX a couple of years ago there were complaints that the show was getting stale and losing it’s appeal, and an attempt to rejuvinate with a new ‘live’ format failed to capture viewers imagination.
However, despite the ratings dwindling the UFC then decided to put on more editions of the show than ever before, with multiple editions in Brazil, TUF Nations, etc along with a consistent onslaught of ‘regular’ TUF.
Sandwich this in-between more live events than ever before and it leads to a term that seems to be coming up more and more often in these articles, and that’s ‘viewer fatigue’.
At this stage there’s no sign that the UFC will look to cut back though with TUF 20 already planned with Anthony Pettis and Gilbert Melendez as coaches and a cast of female strawweight fighters, while a Mexican edition of the show is amongst others currently on the table.
