Saturday night’s UFC 203 preliminary card drew an average of 870,000 viewers on FOX Sports 1.
That places the show at No.5 out of the 8 UFC numbered cards on FS1 so far this year, but positives will be gleaned from the peak rating of 1,374,000 viewers, which occurred during the final preliminary bout between Beche Correira and Jessica Eye.
Earlier, Jason Gonzales Vs Drew Dober had kicked off the FS1 prelims with 590,000 viewers, while Nik Lentz Vs Michael McBride followed with 788,000, and then Brad Tavares Vs Ciao Magalhaes delivered 876,000 viewers, which means that there was a sharp spike in viewers for the woman’s bantamweight bout that followed.
It’ll be interesting to see what kind of business the PPV show afterwards did with former WWE superstar CM Punk on-board, and the initial signs appear to be promising, with the event reported to have drawn a significantly higher than usual 1.2 million Google searches during fight night.
Nobody is expecting Punk to have the same drawing power as the likes of Conor McGregor and Ronda Rousey, who have proven they can blast past the one million PPV sales barrier, but with a ‘normal’ UFC event only doing a few hundred thousands buys these days, if UFC 203 could do in the region of 500,000+ sales, then that would be a clear indication that his presence did have a significant impact.
