Urijah Faber and Frankie Saenz in their bantamweight fight during UFC 194 on December 12, 2015 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The UFC 194 prelims on Saturday night shattered records on FS1. The two hours worth of fights, headlined by Urijah Faber’s victory over Frankie Saenz, averaged 1.931 million viewers, a record for a prelim fight show on FS1. The prelims peaked at 2.38 million viewers for the Faber-Saenz fight.

Furthermore, the two hour UFC 194 weigh-in special on Friday afternoon brought in 294,000 viewers, another FS1 record for a weigh-in. UFC 194 was headlined by Conor McGregor’s 13 second knockout win over Jose Aldo in the main event for the featherweight title and Luke Rockhold’s four-round dismantling of middleweight champion Chris Weidman in the co-main event.

For some extra context on these strong numbers, consider that prior to UFC 194 this weekend, the prelims were averaging 987,500 viewers on FS1 in 2015, meaning that Saturday night’s fights nearly doubled that average. This is also the highest viewership total for a UFC prelim show since February of 2011, when the UFC 126 prelims on Spike drew 1.964 million viewers. Only two fights were featured on that one-hour prelim show.

What these strong numbers tell me, more than anything else, is that stars sell for the UFC. Since Faber lost to Renan Barao in the main event of UFC 169, he’s fought four times in the UFC, has headlined the PPV prelims on FS1 three times, and was in the main event of an FS1 Fight Night card once. Putting him on free TV and allowing a star-studded main card to carry the PPV audience along with the pre-fight, post-fight, and weigh-in shows seems to be a recipe for ratings success.

And while the buyrate for UFC 194 is still unknown, the event did draw a record $10.1 million gate and 16,516 in attendance, a Nevada record. All of these are strong indicators that the UFC will end up with just their second buyrate of over one million in the last five years, and possibly their highest mark since UFC 100 drew 1.6 million buys in 2009.

[Fox Sports]

About Joe Lucia

I hate your favorite team. I also sort of hate most of my favorite teams.