UFC 206 prelims & Bellator afternoon event fall below ratings averages

With a featured fight of light heavyweights Misha Cirkunov vs. Nikita Krylov, Saturday’s UFC 206 prelims on FS1 did 771,000 viewers on FS 1.

While the number is down 60% from November’s stacked UFC 205 prelims, it did beat the UFC 204 prelims (Michael Bisping vs. Dan Henderson II) by about 15%, but that show was up against heavy competition from college football. The number was more in line with the numbers from the UFC 198 (786,000) and UFC 199 prelims (798,000) from earlier this year.

With one show to go in 2016, the PPV prelims on FS 1 are now averaging 1.137 million viewers on FS 1, up 3% from the 2015 average of 1.1 million.

Typically, the prelims number is usually, but not always, an indicator of PPV buys for the show and those two events are currently estimated at doing 290,000 and 320,000 buys respectively. This was was expected to do considerably below that number, with our own Dave Meltzer setting the over/under for the show at 175,000 buys. 

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Saturday afternoon’s Bellator 168 from Florence, Italy, was slightly down from recent numbers at 529,000 viewers, but had no one of note for casual sports fans on the show. Similar UFC shows are usually down about 30-40% from prime time numbers but this is the first time Spike has ran a show like this for Bellator. 

Bellator is now averaging 678,000 per show in 2016, down 9% from their 2015 average of 746,000. They also have one more event for the year: a tape delay show Friday from Dublin, Ireland, featuring a main event of King Mo vs. Satoshi Ishii.