It seems the most recent Bellator MMA card brought a huge audience for Spike. Bellator 149 which featured Ken Shamrock, Kimbo Slice and Royce Gracie averaged an audience of 1.580 million viewers last Friday. Now that’s a record for Spike beating the previous network high by 24 percent.
And the average audience makes Bellator 149 the third mout-watched MMA fight on cable with only two UFC cards beating Bellator.
When Kimbo Slice went into the octagon to fight his former bodyguard, Dada 5000, the audience grew to 2.5 million and when Shamrock took on Gracie afterwards, most of the audience stayed, averaging 2.4 million.
The Bellator card beat most everything on cable Friday night except for Discovery’s Gold Rush and some Fox News programming. The fact that the fight drew well shows that the audience will watch when they have personalities in the card, but it’s also a bit sad that it’s Kimbo Slice and Ken Shamrock who were the drawing cards.
And with the record audience for Spike, it appears that with the Shamrock-Gracie ending, a rematch will be in order and when it airs, it will probably draw another big viewership for the network.
So it was a double-edged sword for Bellator and Spike. Friday night was a big night for the network, but it also had to depend on some MMA retreads to do so.
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About Ken Fang
Ken has been covering the sports media in earnest at his own site, Fang's Bites since May 2007 and at Awful Announcing since March 2013.
He provides a unique perspective having been an award-winning radio news reporter in Providence and having worked in local television.
Fang celebrates the four Boston Red Sox World Championships in the 21st Century, but continues to be a long-suffering Cleveland Browns fan.