After the collapse of Setanta in the UK the UFC made ESPN its British home. However due to the rushed entry of ESPN into the UK sports broadcasting market, only now have we started to get any information about how the UFC is doing ratings wise. And from the first three weeks we can see that UFC is very valuable programming to ESPN with UFC always having at least one show in the station’s top ten most watched shows.
The most viewed UFC show over the past three weeks was a November 25th episode of UFC Unleashed that was watched by 34,000 people and was the station’s third most watched show of that week. On the whole UFC Unleashed has proven to be a fixture in the station’s most watched shows, consistently beating live football matches from Italy, Germany and Holland.
Strangely, both UFC 106 and The Ultimate Finale underperformed compared to what you might expect based on the ‘Unleashed’ ratings. UFC 106 only did 17,000 live (19,000 on the repeat) and the Ultimate Finale was not even in the top ten shows and so definitely doing less than 20,000 viewers. However, its too soon to read anything into that, as UFC 106 was a show that struggled to capture people’s attention and the promotion of the Ultimate Finale in the UK was disrupted due to the TUF series being shown on a different channel (FIVEUSA) and the deal to show the finale live on ESPN only being agreed two days before the show. Sadly, we have no information about how the live UFC 105 special did. Previously the European shows had always been among the highest rated UFC shows with UFC 95 having done 50,000 viewers in February and UFC 99 having done 43,000.
Looking at the numbers we do have we can see that those watching UFC on Setanta have pretty much transferred over to watching ESPN’s coverage. The highest rated UFC programming on Setanta each week usually did between 20,000 and 25,000, so the viewing figures are marginally higher than what the UFC did on Setanta but not by much. The lack of any significant growth in the viewing figures for the UFC is largely due to the strength of ESPN as a platform. While ESPN’s potential for growth within is significant but at the moment it has pretty much inherited Setanta’s market position with ESPN having picked up many of their former rights deals and because of that its viewing figures are very similar. Like the Irish broadcaster, ESPN’s UK channel is based on its weekly English Premiership soccer match and while that soccer match gets more than 400,000 people watching they can’t get that audience to stick around and watch its other programming. In the three weeks we have ratings no programming other than English soccer had more than 95,000 people watching. When viewed in that context the UFC should be pretty happy to be regularly having its most viewed television show of the week hovering around the 30,000 viewers mark. However, if the UFC is to continue to grow as a television property in the UK they need ESPN to continue to develop as a sports channel and increase its market share.
UFC programming that were among the top ten most watched programs on ESPN
w/e 22nd November
5 UFC (Fri 22:30) 21, 000
6 UFC (Thu 22:54) 20, 000
7 UFC (Sun 22:02) 19, 000
10 UFC LIVE (Sat 26:32) 17, 000
w/e 29th November
3 UFC UNLEASHED (Wed 22:15) 34,000
5 UFC UNLEASHED (Fri 22:15) 29,000
w/e 6th December
5 UFC UNLEASHED (Sat 24:02) 27,000
