As we reported on Sunday, the overnight ratings for the UFC’s third effort on Fox were not exactly encouraging. The final ratings are not exactly showing any improvement either. The final story here is going to be that the UFC lost half the viewers from the second Fox effort, which was down from the huge number on the first show.
While no one expected that massive number for the heavyweight title fight between Junior dos Santos and then champion Cain Velasquez to continue forward, I don’t think anyone quite expected this.
Here’s the exact info:
It gets worse:
More after the jump…
Another tweet of some interest:
Look, it’s not hard to figure out what happened. The UFC went for excitement (which they got) but didn’t bring the necessary big names to the party. And we can keep pretending it didn’t matter, but they were heads-up with a boxing show that had four fighters (Canelo, Mosley, Mayweather and Cotto) who are bigger than anyone on that UFC card will ever be in terms of name value. Without star power, no one was going to turn off the PPV they just dropped $70 for.
They’re going to try to spin this into that they still won the timeslot in specific (probably young male) demos. And that may be true, but huge declines and finishing 6th of 8 is not good in any way.
As long as they take it as a learning experience and move forward appropriately there’s no reason for panic just yet.
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