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By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief
Bellator ran unopposed once again on Saturday night on MTV2 from the Cocopah Resort and Casino in Yuma, Ariz., headlined by a bout featuring Bellator Featherweight Champion Joe Warren and his controversial decision win over Marcos Galvao, but the event drew a series low for viewership on the network.
After garnering their second highest rating last week with Bellator 40 - which featured an hour of overlap with Strikeforce's "Diaz vs. Daley" event on Showtime - Bellator 41 drew just 132,000 viewers to MTV2, according to a report from MMAJunkie.com.
That marked a 39 percent decrease from the previous event, and was 18,000 viewers shy of the previous low, the March Bellator 37 event. The ratings for each of season four's events are below:
Penick's Analysis: The shifting timeslots, the day of the week, the non-HD broadcasts, the unknown names, etc., it's all factoring in to having no momentum for these broadcasts. The number last week could have meant MMA fans who were already going to tune in for Strikeforce on Showtime also decided to flip over to Bellator since it was on, but the marks for the unopposed broadcasts are getting worse. This is not a good number unopposed, and this weekend's broadcast could get even worse. Then they take a week off and who knows where the numbers will lie when they come back the first weekend of May. I'll continue to contend that Saturday night's were a really bad night to run for them. Saturday is typically a going out night for the key demographics for MMA, and though the UFC can get a large viewership for multiple events a month, no organization is going to get viewers to tune in every Saturday for three months straight. Maybe it doesn't matter, as the numbers are still larger than what MTV2 was getting in this timeslot, but this drop is not a good sign.
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Jamie Penick, editor-in-chief
(mmatorcheditor@gmail.com)
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