Wednesday night’s UFC Fight Night 31 event, AKA ‘UFC Fight For The Troops 3’ was watched by an average of 641,000 viewers on FOX Sports 1.
That’s almost identical to the 638,000 viewers who tuned in for ‘UFC Fight Night 29’ in early October, suggesting that the audience could be starting to level out on the fledling channel.
Having said that, both of those cards had fairly weak headliners – Jake Shields Vs Damien Maia in UFN 29’s case, and Tim Kennedy Vs Rafael Natal for this week’s event.
In fact, it could be argued that on paper, Kennedy Vs Natal was as bad a main event pairing as we’ve seen in a long time in the UFC so it’s probably something of a relief to all concerned that it didn’t produce even lower ratings.
It’ll be interesting to see how UFC Fight Night 32 does in comparison tonight. While the overall fight card is nothing to write home about, Vitor Belfort Vs Dan Henderson is a strong headliner for a ‘Fight Night’ caliber card, so that could lead to more viewers tuning in than the aforementioned events.
Immediately following UFN31 on Wednesday night came the latest installment of ‘The Ultimate Fighter 18’ and it drew an average of 583,000 viewers.
That’s up 131,000 viewers from the season low last week, but it’s still some way below the average for TUF 18 as a whole and with the ‘Fight Night’ card as a lead-in, really they would have been hoping for better numbers than that.
The UFC are now almost three months into their switch to FS1 and so fans have had a fair amount of time to adjust, yet the ratings still remain disappointing and undoubtedly a signficant backwards step compared to their time on FX, and that’ll surely be a cause for concern.
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UFC Fight Nights on FOX Sports 1:
UFC Fight Night 26: 1.78 million viewers
UFC Fight Night 27: 824,000 viewers
UFC Fight Night 28: 539,000 viewers
UFC Fight Night 29: 638,000 viewers
UFC Fight Night 31: 641,000 viewers
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TUF Season 18 ratings on FOX Sports 1
Episode 1: 762,000 viewers
Episode 2: 870,000 viewers
Episode 3: 639,000 viewers
Episode 4: 778,000 viewers
Episode 5: 640,000 viewers
Episode 6: 725,000 viewers
Episode 7: 672,000 viewers
Episode 8: 476,000 viewers
Episode 9: 452,000 viewers
Episode 10: 583,000 viewers
