In its fourth week on Spike, Bellator looks to have leveled out in the range of what it should expect to do from this point forward.
Thursday night’s show, headlined by the Alexander Shlemenko vs. Maiquel Falcao match for the vacant middleweight title, did a 0.64 rating and 807,000 viewers. The viewership was up 14 percent from the previous week’s 705,000.
The show did a 0.7 rating in Males 18-49, the best of the four episodes to date.
The positives about the number is it was drawn with a Brazilian against a Siberian in the main event, and of the five televised matches, only one featured an American fighter. While Shlemenko has been one of Bellator’s top fighters since his arrival in 2010, he was never one of the key fighters promoted due to his only basic understanding of English. Perhaps most important, Bellator’s number increased even though its lead-in, TNA Wrestling, dropped 11 percent to 1,412,000 viewers which was closer to that show’s normal range after being above average for three weeks.
However, the Bellator replay dropped from 17 percent from 323,000 viewers the prior week to 268,000 viewers on Thursday.
After a month in, a show that may start out strong with first show publicity is usually at around its normalized level. Bellator is probably going to be in the 675,000 to 825,000 viewer level consistently on Spike, close to five times the viewers it previously had on MTV2.