WEC 46 Ratings: 640,000 Tune In For “Varner vs. Henderson”
640,000 viewers tuned in for Sunday’s Versus-broadcast of “WEC 46: Varner vs. Henderson,” which took place at the ARCO Arena in Saramento, California and was headlined by a title-unification bout between Ben Henderson and Jamie Varner.
The WEC’s previous event, WEC 45 in December headlined by Donald Cerrone vs. Ed Ratcliff, drew just 330,000 viewers.
Sunday’s event also featured star former featherweight champion Urijah Faber vs. Raphael Assuncao and fellow former title-holder Mike Brown vs. Anthony Morrison.
On Monday, an average 1.7 million viewers watched UFC Fight Night 20, headlined by Gray Maynard vs. Nate Diaz, on Spike.
SEE ALSO: WEC 46 recap, WEC 46 results, WEC 46 Salaries, WEC 46 Injuries, WEC 46 coverage
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HT: MMAjunkie
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Wow, I honestly didn’t know that there was that big of a gap between WEC’s numbers and that of a UFC Fight Night. I know the whole DirecTV thing will play a small role in reducing the numbers but not enough to explain the huge difference.
That’s why the WEC fighters get paid so much less money, though. I think the DirecTV thing makes around a 100-300k viewer difference on the average card. The last card that was on DirecTV was WEC 42, which did 670k viewers (withough Urijah Faber). The last card that had Faber on DirecTV was WEC 41 which drew over a million viewers (having a hard time finding exact number, but it drew a 1.1 national household rating. From what I understand 1 point is equal to 1,149,000 households. Therefore I believe it would be 1.1 x 1,149,000 which equals 1.26 million viewers.)
Faber is a huge draw, but the fact that this was a non-title affair would likely take at least 100-200k viewers away, but certainly wouldn’t account for there being half as many viewers. Given that fact, I would venture to say that on a Faber card, the DirecTV issue means roughly 300-400k less viewers.
Wow, thanks for the info Justin!
I’m sure that WEC will be glad when the whole VS/ DirecTV dispute gets cleared away.
I’m sure they will too. The rumors I’ve seen indicate that things will be sorted out by March.
I wonder if the Direct TV/Versus will hurt the numbers of the UFN vs. when it’s on spike. I also wonder if thats why they are putting on such an impressive free card in vera vs. jones, this way more people will tune in even though it will be on a different outlet.
That maybe why they are putting UFN cards on VS to let people know they have fights on that Channel. To bad they dont get the attention that they deserve. Sometimes (more often than not) that have way more exciting cards that other mma cards (even UFC). That probably has to do with the fact that they have really light fighter who have amazing cardio and can go almost 100% for all 15 minutes
Nice numbers for the WEC, which will not only help the fighters and the promotion, but maybe nudge this DirecTV/Versus thing into some sort of resolution…