Ratings! UFC Fight Night 57 Peaks At Over 1 Million Viewers
UFC Fight Night 57 hit our screens last Saturday (November 22nd, 2014) and provided fans worldwide with a plethora of tasty fights. At the top of the bill was a crucial featherweight battle between former lightweight champion Frankie Edgar, and resurgent WEC veteran Cub Swanson. For a free card, UFC Fight Night 57 held a lot of weight.
According to the recent ratings report on MMAFighting.com, the card scored a strong showing on the preliminary card and main card. The prelims did 777,000 viewers, in comparison to the average Fight Night viewer ratings for the year which is 468,000. Interesting figures for the prelims alone, especially considering Manny Pacquiao vs Chris Algieri were just arriving at the Macau Sands for their WBO welterweight fight.
On to the main card, and Frankie Edgar vs Cub Swanson saw a peaked viewer rating of 1,021,000 viewers. Check out what Dave Meltzer’s report says about the success of UFC Fight Night 57:
“What helped the show is the main event going the nearly full five rounds, with Edgar finishing with four seconds left in the final round. This gave the headliners more than 30 minutes between intros and fight time to build the audience. There is a substantial correlation between the length of the main event and the success of the ratings.”
“The competition for Edgar vs. Swanson included Manny Pacquiao vs. Chris Algieri on pay-per-view, plus college football, with USC vs. UCLA doing 3.6 million viewers on ABC and Missouri vs. Tennessee doing 3.3 million viewers on ESPN. Both games ended before UFC’s main event went into the cage, but they did go against much of the main card.”
After a year marked with a 40% loss in profit, this is just the news that the UFC needs. With a hectic schedule to start 2015, could the UFC be on the up again? Watch this space….
