The trend continues. Without Urijah Faber headlining, the WEC just doesn’t pull in the ratings like they do when he’s on the card. Even Jens Pulver, Miguel Torres and Brian Bowles couldn’t push WEC 47 above the 400,000 viewers mark.
This past weekend’s WEC 47 event on Versus scored a 0.46 household rating and 373,000 viewers, MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com) today confirmed.
The ratings were down sharply – 42 percent in all – compared to World Extreme Cagefighting’s prior show, WEC 46 (640,000 viewers), which took place in January and benefited from proven draw Urijah Faber and a main-event title-unification bout between Benson Henderson and Jamie Varner.
To put those numbers in perspective, it’s the second-lowest rating the WEC has drawn in the past two years only besting WEC 45’s dismal 330,000 viewers. It will be interesting to see how these numbers compare to the UFC’s Versus card in a week and a half. Zach Arnold doesn’t think it will perform as many think it will mainly because of Versus’ lack of branding power. He might be right, but the card is stacked for a free show so you never know.
My biggest question though is what happens if WEC 48 is a success on pay-per-view? Would that mean the days of watching Faber fight on free television are over? I don’t know, but someone who I’m sure doesn’t like the idea of that is Versus given they’re struggling to draw a good rating without him.
Image via Sherdog
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the fact that directTV subscribers have to pay extra for Versus definately will effect the viewers
[...] you thought WEC 47’s ratings were disappointing, wait till you see the estimates for UFC 110’s pay-per-view buy rate. From [...]