Television numbers for Bellator: Dynamite 2 are in, and while peak viewership was higher than the first Dynamite installment, the overall rating is not particularly encouraging.
There’s a bit of good news and bad news as far as the ratings for last Friday’s Bellator: Dynamite 2 show in St. Louis, Missouri. The good news is that the main event between Quinton Jackson and Satoshi Ishii averaged 914,000 viewers (1.04 million with +3 DVR) and peaked at 1 million (1.14 million with +3 DVR). Bad news? The card as a whole is not even one of Bellator’s top 5 highest rated events of 2016.
Spike TV officials confirmed that the three-hour main card broadcast averaged 675,000 (with +3 DVR numbers), which makes it the worst rated “tentpole” event under the Scott Coker era, which dates back to the fall of 2014. The previous low was 618,000 (686,000 with +3 DVR) for Bellator 153: Koreshkov vs. Henderson. Overnight ratings for Dynamite 2 came in at 601,000, per Dave Meltzer of MMAFighting. The previous major event, Bellator 154: Davis vs. King Mo, averaged 709,000 viewers. This comes after Bellator 156 had an overnight rating below 500,000, making it the least-watched Spike TV event under Coker. Excluding +3 DVR info, the 601,000 figure for Dynamite 2 rates lower than all but 3 Bellator MMA cards for 2016 (148, 152, and 156).
Last year, Bellator: Dynamite 1 took place on September 19th and averaged 800,000 viewers, with peak viewership at 930,000 in the 9:15-9:30 PM ET time window. This means that while peak viewing figures were slightly higher than the first Dynamite card, but overall numbers declined by nearly 25%.
As was the case last year, Dynamite 2 featured a mixture of both MMA and kickboxing bouts. Unlike Dynamite 1, there was no Lenne Hardt, no one-night light heavyweight MMA tournament, and instead of GLORY kickboxing, we saw two Bellator Kickboxing bouts. Needless to say, the novelty value of merely having MMA and kickboxing all on one card has not panned out well for Bellator.
On another Bellator note, their kickboxing card averaged 418,000 viewers (439,000 on +3 DVR), with Hisaki Kato’s KO of Joe Schilling peaking at 642,000. This event aired straight after the end of Dynamite 2.