The Ultimate Fighter Live Finale Averages 1 Million Viewers
By Chris Leslie on June 6, 2012
The Ultimate Fighter Live Finale aired last Friday night and the ratings are in. The finale averaged a million viewers, according to Sherdog.com, while the Fuel TV preliminaries averaged 165,000 viewers.
These numbers were down drastically from the TUF 14 Finale, the last TUF show on Spike TV, which averaged 2.5 million viewers. Despite the new channel and format, the show consistently averaged lower in the ratings this season.
Despite falling short of the UFC’s expectations for the show’s ratings, FX has apparently been quite content with the show’s performance as it still showed an increase in ratings from the network’s previous Friday night programming.
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Just move it to Wednesday already.
Good for the network but bad for UFC?
Seriously I have watched every season of TUF until this one. I am not staying home on a Friday night.
I also did not like this whole “live format”. If you are going to do live fights, at least have play by play guys. I preferred the full edited shows of previous years personally.
And what’s the deal with the fighters in recent seasons? They all look the same and have zero personalities. Can they not find any original people out there? Maybe another comeback season is certainly needed.
I also agree basing the whole show around coach vs coach is a poor decision. Especially since 50% of the time, one coach gets injured and their entire plan/season finale is screwed because of it!
HELL, bring back physical team challenges like in season 1! I thought that was great lol!
I’m glad I don’t get paid to talk about it, because I can’t believe there are 1 million people out of 2 who can’t pull it together to record it. Imo the UFC is making as much money or more this year so they don’t really mind that numbers are down. fox still pays them and is still happy. UFCs bread and butter is ppv, so Tuf is just extra money at the end of the day. I’m sure they’ll be banging to switch days, but they’re not going to make that big a deal when fox is happy and they are getting paid good money.
If you check out Dana’s interview with helwani, he really cares about it and seems pissed it isn’t doing well. Also he doesnt do well with criticism of the show or ratings.
Given current PPV numbers, I don’t know that Fox isn’t their new primary (or co-primary) income stream.
True but they still gotta be pulling in somewhere around half a billion a year on ppv alone. And we know they only pay maybe half a million to a million to fighters per event, so I think they’re doing ok in ppv. With the tuf show, my point is just that fox should know what’s best for them, and will move the show to a different night if it works out financially better for them. But more than anything, I know Dana never likes to get criticized, but if they are paying UFC good enough then hey I guess its not as tragic as it could be. Which leads to your point about fox maybe being a primary revenue stream. And if they are then whatever makes them happiest is mostly what matters.
To me the show has only gotten worse cuz there isn’t as much unfound talent, so its kinda hard to magically change that. There is also the minute fact that its on a brand new channel, and sometimes it takes a year for the less interested people to figure it out And find the new channel.
The top fighters are paid extremely well. NSAC executive director Keith Kizer stated that Mir, Dos Santos, and Velasquez all earned well over a million when it was all said and done at 146. Same for Jones and Evans at UFC 145. There may be a large gap between the haves and have nots but c’est la vie.
I mean they were paying Diaz 300K just to show up to press conferences he was already contractually obligated to show up at…
Plus, why would moving a show only targeted to one demographic benefit Fox? Great, they get more viewers… yay… but would it get more than Justified (average over 2 million viewers in just the 18-49 demographic), record-setting Sons of Anarchy (average over 5 million total viewers and 3.2 million viewers 18-49), American Horror Story (over 3 million viewers), Archer (over 2 million viewers), It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (over 2 million viewers)… I can keep going… FX is doing extremely well for itself, so you’re going to have a hard time convincing a network to bump a known strong quantity for one that’s doing ok but the makers say it’d do better on another night.. everyone says that.
This is part of growing up in a big boy world for the UFC. At Spike they competed with such hit powerhouse shows such as… CSI reruns? So they could dictate where they were. They can’t do that now. The UFC is more upset they’ve fallen short of their own ridiculous expectations and many hardcore fans refuse to believe the sport is what it is. Which is a young sport competing in a massive market with an already limited demographic.