UFC 164 Prelims: TV Ratings

Last Saturday night FOX Sports 1 aired the UFC 164 prelims to an average of 809,000 viewers.

That’s the lowest audience for the UFC so far on the new sports channel, though only 15,000 lower than tuned in for ‘UFC Fight Night 27’ a few days earlier.

In general the UFC’s prelim coverage averaged over a million viewers during it’s time on FX so it’s a bit disappointing from the UFC’s perspective that they appear to be taking a slight hit since moving over to FS1.

It always looked likely that the UFC would have to build their audience to some extent given that this is a brand new channel whereas FX is already well established, but the opening night’s ‘UFC On FOX Sports 1’ event drawing almost 1.8 million viewers may have given a little bit of false hope that they were going to hit the ground running and continue in that fashion.

Still, it should be stressed that despite being lower than the UFC would ideally like, both ‘UFC Fight Night 27’ and ‘UFC 164 Prelims’ are outperforming by some distance pretty much everything else on FS1 at this moment in time.

It’ll be interesting to see how last night’s UFC content fared. ‘UFC Fight Night 28’ was the third live event in 8 days and was arguably the weakest of them which doesn’t bode particularly well for it. On the other hand, the three main fights on the card delivered and TUF 18 premiered directly afterwards so hopefully that will have encouraged more people to tune in.

Ross launched MMA Insight (previously FightOfTheNight.com) in 2009 as a way to channel his passion for the sport of mixed martial arts. He's since penned countless news stories and live fight reports along with dozens of feature articles as the lead writer for the site, reaching millions of fans in the process.