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CHARLES JAY
Commentary on MMA history….as it’s happening

Reportedly, the ratings on CBS’ second telecast of Elite XC were down 43% from its May 31 debut. While that number itself may be deceiving, since it was measured against a fight with Kimbo Slice that kicked off the series, it does tell you some things, one of which is that the sport opf mixed martial arts, as a generic entity, isn’t enough to pull in fans, at least in this current context. When the names weren’t there, the viewers weren’t either.

I am not so sure that bodes well for the future growth of MMA. As one person from inside the industry told me, “A lot of people thought you could get uinto this industry and make money almost by accident. And if that were true, there wasn’t any better time to do it than just recently. But it may just be that this audience, the real audience that can be depended upon to watch the sport itself, for the sake of the sport, is very limited. Maybe it’s just a nice-sized cult.”

If those words are true, perhaps the sport winds up losing ground, as evidenced by what is happening with this CBS “experiment.”

There is a winner here, and that winner is the UFC, which is proving that its product is somewhat impervious to that kind of elasticity brought on by “name” performer versus “no name” performer. Not that a fight with Anderson Silva in the main event won’t draw considerably more than a fight featuring Michael Bisping in terms of the pay-per-view audience, but the popularity of the fighters like Anderson Silva can be built over time because the UFC brand is that which conquers all. Could that have been more prominently on display than on that July 26 date when Elite XC could only score 341,000 viewers in the key 18-34 demographic for its live championship event, while the UFC, airing a replay of the last Sean Sherk-B.J. Penn fight on Spike TV outdrew it by over 90,000 viewers in that group, in addition to garnering a higher rating in the expanded Men’s 18-49 category?

And as attractive as the Afflcition: Banned card was aesthetically, it is not likely that it topped the 100,000 pay-per-view buys the group’s VP, Tom Atenciop, says it attained, or surpassed it by much. Meanwhile, UFC, which aired the Anderson Silva-James Irvin fight on Spike TV at the same time, got an audience of 3.8 million viewers., and effectively cut into the Affliction subscriptions - which needed to be 250K to break even - according to Atencio, even though the UFC card was inferior overall.

The UFC can keep doing this ad infinitim, and unless Affliction can put Fedor on every show, and Elite XC can do the same with Kimbo, they are going to have a harder time developing a regular audience that will watch it for the sake of its own event, rather than the idea of watching a specific star in action.

I know this is a departure from what I wrote in the past, as I was projecting that the performer was going to be the future, rather than the organization. That is going to hold true in many cases, but maybe for promotions that are more or less “one-off” venturs. The fact is that the UFC brand is giving every indication of holding up. Inasmuch as the UFC, by this time, can play “spoiler” by placing programming opposite signature events by its competitors, and simply put it down as a loss leader, they stand a good chance of prompting these competitors to bleed themselves of the money it’s going to take to stay afloat for the long haul.