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UFC 75 draws huge numbers
By Zach Arnold | September 11, 2007
UFC’s home page says it all – UFC 75 on Spike TV is the most-watched UFC event in history. The event drew a 3.1 rating. It’s an excellent rating for the show overall. Even better for UFC is that the ratings numbers grew for each fight on the show incrementally, meaning people did not turn off the TV even though the show went past Midnight.
Historically speaking, it’s interesting to compare the ratings UFC is drawing on cable versus the ratings that the major Japanese promotions draw on free-to-air Japanese TV. In Japan, cable and satellite is not strong in terms of ratings for any sort of fight-related programming. When K-1 draws a 10.0 or so for a rating on TBS or Fuji TV, that’s considered ‘poor’ – yet if that rating was on cable, it would be an amazing number.
Topics: Media, MMA, UFC, UK, Zach Arnold | 35 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
If nearly anything that isn’t the Super Bowl does a 10.0 on network TV at any time of day, its essentially a raging success. Its kinda unfair to position the UFC versus K-1 in that sense.
A 1.0 on basic cable is considered a success. A 2.0 is a big success. That is how this should be viewed.
In Japan, they really don’t have much beyond network TV. Yes, they have other channels, but a thing called cable or PPV never took off in their country.
It’s funny how out of touch the Internet MMA Media is with the casual fan. They just have no clue. Sherdog posted a few articles talking about how poorly the fight was hyped up and how nobody cared about the title fight. And then the ratings come out and completely prove those theories wrong. But to be fair, Sherdog wasn’t alone. Many other hardcore fans were saying the same thing.
In all honesty, the even went fantastic for the UFC. People got to see “The Guy Who Beat Liddell” go in a 5 round war and prove that he is not a flash in the pan. They saw a very controversial decision that will likely set-up a rematch later this year (my guess is at the TUF 6 Finale). This will only bring up the ratings for that event. And unlike boxing where BS decisions happen and we don’t see a rematch…. It is likely that fans will get to see the rematch for free as well, and most fight fans will get the sour taste right out of their mouth.
This also shows that if the UFC puts a title fight on SpikeTV, that the fans will come out like crazy to watch it. Fight fans appreciate a top tier fight being on TV, even though it is between two fighters who aren’t the biggest stars.
This is nothing but positive news for the UFC. It was no shock that Ortiz/Shamrock 3 got big ratings for the freakshow. But the fact that the fans all came back for a legit fight card…. Makes it feel like this sport (or at least the UFC) has really taken off.
UFC is hot, the rest of MMA is not.
We have an Elite XC show event in Hawaii this weekend that very few, if any casual fans know about. Hell, I don’t have much to say about the event that is coming up this weekend.
As for the promoting job of the ‘unification’ title match for Rampage vs. Henderson, it wasn’t great by any means. Not lousy, but nothing to get overly excited about. What the ratings from the event did prove, however, is that Jackson is a legitimate star in the business and MMA = UFC in the eyes of most fans now.
“It’s funny how out of touch the Internet MMA Media is with the casual fan.”
It always startles me when 45 Huddle says some real poignant, accurate shit. Nonetheless, spot fucking on.
^ Agreed.
I really thought that they hadn’t done enough to promote the main event itself…I guess to some point the whole free UFC #’d event (vs. $40 PPV) sells itself. But still that’s some monstrous numbers there.
And I agree – it’s unfair to just compare the raw numbers like that, but I don’t think Zach was really trying to do that. A 3.1 on cable is monstrous is it not? If it were on network TV I think you’d have to use some sort of multiplier for the type of number it got. Also when you consider the amount of choice available in the US vs. what is likely available in Japan I bet the numbers arent that far off (I could be wrong on that, but making the educated guess – experts?).
“What the ratings from the event did prove, however, is that Jackson is a legitimate star in the business and MMA = UFC in the eyes of most fans now.”
Since the first Ultimate Fighter reality show, MMA has always been the UFC to most fans. That is because of the incredible number of new fans of the sport since that show. They have all been “raised” by the UFC to think there are no other organizations. This has been going on for 3 years. It isn’t recent.
As far as casual fans being aware of other MMA promotions, I’m pretty sure they see the commercials and are conscious of the fact that there are some upstarts running around.
Getting them to give a shit, on the other hand, is another story and a responsibility that is up to the promoters.
I can retract my comment if it makes you sleep better at night…..
The facts are simple. The majority of fans just want to be entertained. They don’t care about Fedor. They could care less about Barnett. They don’t even know who Jake Shields is. And they certainly have no clue about all of us getting our hopes up of the UFC signing Gilbert Melendez after his next fight. They just want to see good fights, and the UFC Champions are the champions of the world to them.
They don’t care how much Josh Koscheck got paid, or if Marcus Davis got an $80,000 bonus. Or if EliteXC’s rating by percentage were better then a repeat UFC Unleashed. In fact, they probably don’t know what EliteXC is. They don’t know Dana White contradicts himself in every interview. Or that Roger Huerta is being babied at this point in his career.
Give the fight fans some good fights on the same card, easily recognizable champions, and a little drama….. And they will come in droves to watch what is perceived as a god event.
+1
I guess us hardcores sometime just forget how to quit overanalyzing & dissecting things and be “marks” once and a while 🙂
To be honest…. I am jealous of those fans. I wish I could watch a fight and not judge it round by round. I wish I could watch a controversial fight and not come online to discuss it for hours. I wish I wouldn’t care who got paid what. It would be nice to just sit down and enjoy the fights, without knowing all the backstories I know about the sport for the last 10+ years…..
I know I give guys like Josh Gross grief for his views on the radio show. But I couldn’t imagine covering the sport 24/7 AND talking about it 6 hours a week so anybody could hear it. I would be bitter…..
admittedly, i have been watching mma for a very short while. i’m still getting caught up on all the history, but i’ve got a descent grasp of the current mma landscape.
i am familiar with elite xc and ifl and k-1 and strikeforce, and even cage rage and shooto and upstarts like palace fighting championships and mmac. i get that most of you guys are excited about names like fedor and melendez and yamamoto and kang (and for the record, i’m the person who asked dana white about kang on the last ufc conference call). i’m well aware of dana white’s colorful and irascible nature. i do know that marcus davis was awarded two (well deserved) win bonuses.
what i don’t know is why so many of mma’s long time fans have this “keeper of the sacred flame” mentality. mma is not your secret society anymore. any boob with a tube can partake, and we’ll all become come engaged to varying extents.
besides, do none of you realize that there is a wealth of information in the internet for anyone who cares to look? do really think that no one, NO ONE, who has heard names like fedor and henderson and lindland bothered to google these men to find out who they are and what they’ve done? the same vehicle that allows all of you sit somewhere and pontificate, also allows us lowly noobs to sit somewhere and explore our new interest.
btw, what exactly were people supposed to do the herald the arrival of the first unified champ? take off a week for fasting and prayer?
i am at a loss to explain the all of this disdain for newcomers to the sport.
not to mention, there is a whole generation of future fighters that are only learning of mma for the first time. many of them will have been introduced to the sport by watching the ufc. you guys gonna crap all over them, too?
Welcome to the internet. Online communities seem to hate new people.
The insult du jour is “newfag,” as in “lurk moar newfag.”
I’ve never held that attitude but I’ve gotten pretty used to it. For what it’s worth it has encouraged me to educate myself (i.e. “lurk moar”) before speaking up, and that’s not really a bad thing.
manos, opinions are opinions and eveyone is entitled to one. granted, you might want to back up your opinions with something a little less subjective. but no one should have to submit themselves to judgement by someone else’s standards for the right to speak. the fact that some people have not watched since day one and don’t “train,” doesn’t mean they are not entitiled to offer an opinion on what they see before them. the standard being applied is not only unreasonable, but it is being applied by people who have no business doing so.
45 Huddle…then why were you a couple days ago shitting on Cage Rage & Elite XC for letting fans watch free fights live on the internet?
I don’t give a fuck if its profitable or not…its fun to watch Tank Abbot or Vitor Belfort fight someone while I’m eating lunch on a Saturday.
Speaking as a ‘veteran’ fan, I salivate at the thought of fresh mma fans, and I always say welcome to the club, and freely loan out my collection to those interested. However, I can honestly say that for all of the newer fans that I personally come across, they do not want to, or have the time to invest, in learning other promotions and thier “storylines”.
Ex. We ‘veteran’ fans know the importance of Fedor, Shogun, Gomi, Hansen, ‘KID’ etc. and we can show their fights to others. But the impact is lost on most newer fans because they don’t see the context of how incredible these fighters/matches were at the time of said fights. Fedor’s domination of his opponents means little if you don’t know the history of his opponents as well. I showed the Fedor-Nog 1 match to someone who went away with the idea that Sylvia could KO Fedor, because “he’s mostly a ground-n-pounder”. Granted that’s just one opinion, but one that is solely influenced by Zuffa.
Like Breen, I agree, 45 Huddle has a valid point 🙂
Right on Crystal Hudson.
Two thumbs up to that stuff. There’s always going to be two classes of fans for everything out there. The ones that just surf channels and stop when they see two guys fighting, and the ones that see one fight and look forward to the next one.
The internet makes it very easy to go from knowing nothing to being embroiled in the petty arguments of the remnants of the Pride fanbase, and youtube, much as I hate it, pretty much gives people access to nearly the entire history of mixed martial arts. 😀
I think people are forgetting the difference between advertising and marketing. Did the UFC advertise UFC 75? Definitely. There were commercials for it all the time, and not just on Spike. I saw one during a commercial break for Mythbusters on Discovery. Not exactly your traditional UFC audience. So with all that advertising, it’s no wonder how many people were aware of the event and tuned in.
What the UFC did not do was market the event. There was little PR, media placement, or targeted planning to capitalize on untapped market segments. They didn’t just need to notify people of the event, they needed to tell an interesting story, build anticipation for its resolution, and market the hell out of the personalities involved. The unification angle would have been a perfect opportunity, compounded by the fact that Rampage is a media planner’s dream. Everything that guy says is marketable.
In the end the distinction comes down to this. The UFC definitely let people know the event was coming, they just didn’t convince anyone why they should care. All they did was recapture all the lookey-loos who came to watch Ortiz-Shamrock III. Shouldn’t a fight of this magnitude have brought some more eyeballs?
I think people are forgetting the difference between advertising and marketing. Did the UFC advertise UFC 75? Definitely. There were commercials for it all the time, and not just on Spike. I saw one during a commercial break for Mythbusters on Discovery. Not exactly your traditional UFC audience. So with all that advertising, it’s no wonder how many people were aware of the event and tuned in.
What the UFC did not do was market the event. There was little PR, media placement, or targeted planning to capitalize on untapped market segments. They didn’t just need to notify people of the event, they needed to tell an interesting story, build anticipation for its resolution, and market the hell out of the personalities involved. The unification angle would have been a perfect opportunity, compounded by the fact that Rampage is a media planner’s dream. Everything that guy says is marketable.
In the end the distinction comes down to this. The UFC definitely let people know the event was coming, they just didn’t convince anyone why they should care. All they did was recapture all the lookey-loos who came to watch Ortiz-Shamrock III. Shouldn’t a fight of this magnitude have brought some more eyeballs?
Featuring a guy who’s fought twice in the UFC, both times on PPV, and another guy who hasn’t been in the company for almost a decade? This is the worst talking point ever. I think its almost shameful to demand that the UFC should not only have done their best rating ever, but to have eclipsed it by a large margin without the help
Erg, someone merge this:
….without the help of mainstream media in hyping the bout.
At this stage of the game I don’t see how new MMA-fans and the mainstream media portraying/believing MMA = UFC is a bad thing. Granted it felt a bit frustrating when PRIDE was alive and the “TUF-noob” trend started, but considering where we’re at right now, the UFC really *is* MMA, and their titles are the only ones that mean anything. No new fan who only follows UFC is missing out on much at all in terms of grasping who the top MMA fighters in the world are.
As a longtime MMA fan, its not that I hate the new fans, but what I hate is the inevitable “know-it-all” new fan, who seem to come twofold in the realm of MMA.
There are plenty of new fans who are not as apparently well-informed as CH. Plenty of guys who claim that Chuck Lidell and Randy Couture are the be all and end all of the MMA world. As the knowledgeable fan knows, this could not be further from the truth. And even people who “know” who Fedor, Kawajiri and Melendez are, have never seen them fight and do not have a real sense of the skill and excitement they bring.
I’m all for new fans, but just dont claim to really know whats going on if youve never seen more than the UFC.
“No new fan who only follows UFC is missing out on much at all in terms of grasping who the top MMA fighters in the world are.”
Except at lightweight.
And featherweight. UFC certainly does like to show Faber in the crowd at their events though, and the commentators don’t have any shame referring to the WEC.
It could use a little more cross-promotion, but beyond merging the two entities, I’m not sure how much more you can do. I’d be interested in seeing what the ratings are on WEC programming. It’s IMHO some of the most compelling stuff out there.
jason bennett, if new fans don’t want to invest their time, so what? if they form an opinion of a fighter based on one fight, so what? what does that mean?
jeremy (ntj), they’re not “classes” of fans. is there some sort of caste system among mma fandom?
sam scaff, do you prefer know it all “old” fans who think their word is law?
about these fighters who may be unfamiliar names in the US: there are a lot of people who don’t know who or what is popular in other parts of the world. there are indian film stars that have more pull at the box office than any celebrity in the US. don’t you think some people in japan thought we were ‘slow’ when we finally picked up on The Ring? have any of you seen shows like Hex, Jekyl, and Torchwood, three of the best sci-fi series to ever make it across the pond? are people who have not seen these shows not qualified to offer their opinions on other sci-fi shows, or the sci-fi genre, in general?
The elitists here need to understand that the UFC hasn’t brainwashed the “casual” fan into thinking that MMA=UFC. 6000 plus people paid to see the IFL semi-finals and these were not just hardcore fans. I sat next to a dad and his karate practicing 13-year old daughter who knew that this is the sport of MMA.
Its not as though if these casual fans were exposed to Pride or Pancrase or K-1, they’d realize they have been hoodwinked by the UFC into thinking they are the only org that matters. As Crystal said, everyone can google Fedor in a heatbeat.
The UFC is the market leader because they learned from their mistakes and they put together a product that people enjoy (as Huddle said). The latter part is the toughest pill for the diehards to swallow.
Which is why most of the North American broadsheet media calls MMA “ultimate fighting,” right?
A good part of UFC’s lead in the MMA marketplace has to do with how strong they have built their brand. It’s no different than people who call tissues “kleenex.”
Its not as though if these casual fans were exposed to Pride or Pancrase or K-1, they’d realize they have been hoodwinked by the UFC into thinking they are the only org that matters. As Crystal said, everyone can google Fedor in a heatbeat.
How would they be “hoodwinked”? What MMA bouts, especially at 205 and above would really matter that are being done in other organizations, K-1 included? These people don’t care about some 123 lb japanese dude with an Afro and never will.
CH-
I wasn’t saying that the tendency of internet communities to shun new blood is a good thing, I actually quite despise that attitude. (though i did point to its one silver lining)
I was just trying to explain, that’s the way it is.
Right, but that doesn’t mean that people don’t know that other brands of tissue exists. Most people tend to say “Coke”, but Pepsi is still a player. People use to play “Nintendo” which became “PlayStation” which became “Xbox”. All strong brands, but it didn’t prevent a competitor from overtaking the previous one.
Branding does not make the product. Branding can only reinforce the product. You seem to believe that UFC is the market leader because of their branding/marketing. I believe that they created a product that people want and their brand reinforces the perception that they are the best.
I use class as a synonym for group. If you choose to interpret that as caste, it’s your business.
I shall therefore rescind my “right on” and ignore your future comments.
“I believe that they created a product that people want and their brand reinforces the perception that they are the best.”
True that.
Let us not let the perception of Dana White as an evil conjuror in league with the devil make us forget that the UFC is where it is mainly because it’s totally kickass.
rescind your “right on”!? no, anything but that!
look, i know what you meant jeremy, but i don’t think you all realize how you guys sound sometimes. read some old threads with comments like: ‘us hardcore fans,’ ‘our sport,’ ‘we who know the history,’ ‘those of us who care about fedor,’ etc. it’s this whole us vs. them philosophy by which some of you hold yourself not only separate from, but above the ‘tuf noobs’ and the ‘casual fans.’
look at all the generalizations constantly being made about people who ‘think ufc=mma’ and ‘don’t know who dan henderson is,’ and so on and so forth. many of you can be exceedingly condescending when talking about new fans. and for what?
please don’t think that because i choose to respond directly to a particular comment that i’m trying to attack anyone. i’m just addressing some of the individual points being made. and yes, sometimes i will disagree with a person and i will say so. but in general, i tend to speak very formally, which may seem curt in written form.
CH,
I gotta agree with you about elitist attitudes of MMA fans. I’ve been accused many times of having a wrong opinion, if that were possible, just because I have not watched MMA since the beginning of time. But trust me, the discussions here is generally civil compared to what goes on in the Sherdog forums.
Certain fans cling to certain fighters or certain leagues. I am a hardcore football fan, but I only watch the NFL. I couldn’t care less about the Arena league or the CFL. That doesn’t make me any less of a fan than someone who watches only the CFL. Likewise, I am sure there are fans whose only knowledge consists of the UFC. They may not feel like they should have to know Pride, EliteXC, Hero, etc. Breadth of knowledge doesn’t necessarily make one right or wrong.
Hardcore fans would have bet their left arm that Cro Cop would have dominated the UFC heavyweight division, destroy Gonzaga and Congo… And the TUF Noobs would have predicted that this new fighter from Japan would get his assed handed in the UFC. Well, it turns out the TUF Noob was smarter than we thought.