UFC 144 Prelims Another Uptick in TV Ratings

The TV ratings are in for the UFC 144 Prelims on FX, and things appear to be picking up as the UFC and Fox start to ramp up their seven-year partnership. The UFC 144 Prelims drew an average audience of 1.5 million viewers on Saturday night.

The two-hour telecast featured four bouts, topped off by Takanori Gomi’s second-round comeback TKO of Eiji Mitsuoka.

The UFC’s preliminary bout broadcasts on FX started off a little slow with only 880,000 viewers tuning in for the UFC 142 Rio prelims in January. Things picked up with UFC 143 on Super Bowl weekend drawing 1.4 million viewers.

With the 1.5 million viewers for the UFC 144 prelims, the promotion has average 1.26 million viewers per event over the course of three showings on FX. That’s slightly below the 1.4 million average over the lifetime of prelim shows on Spike TV, but the UFC 143 and UFC 144 prelims were right in line with that average.

The preliminary bout coverage reached a peak of 2.0 million viewers for UFC 126 on Spike TV, so the FX coverage, with 1.5 million viewers, isn’t far off the mark.

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