Bellator Fighting Championships saw its ratings improve immensely this past weekend for it’s Bellator 51 event from the Canton Memorial Civic Center in Ohio.
The event featured the opening round of the Season Five Bantamweight Tournament and showcased two spectacular knockouts on the main card. Former Cuban Olympian Alexis Vila ended Joe Warren’s bid to capture two Bellator titles with a 64-second knockout, while Eduardo Dantas used a flying knee to down fellow Brazilian Wilson Reis in the second round. The other tournament bantamweights to move onto the second round included Marcos Galvao and Ed West.
Bellator 51 drew an audience of 158,000 viewers for the live event on MTV2 on Saturday night, Sept. 24. That was an improvement of 44,000 over the Sept. 17 Bellator 50 show which saw the lowest numbers ever on MTV2 with 114,000 viewers.
Despite the increase, according to MMAjunkie.com who posted the ratings of all the Bellator events on MTV2, the numbers rank fourth last out of seventeen events.
Bellator was saddled with a poor time slot from MTV2 in it’s own defense, having to compete directly with the UFC 135 pay-per-view event.
The promotions next event is set for this Saturday and will feature the opening round of the heavyweight tournament. Bellator will though, have to compete with the live television broadcast of the UFC on Verus 6 event.
It’s doubtful that the upstart promotion will see it’s viewer numbers return to the 200,000+ numbers just yet.