Ultimate Fight Night 7 drew record ratings

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The two-hour Spike TV broadcast of "UFC: The Final Chapter" shattered all of the UFC's ratings records on Tuesday night, October 10th.

Headlined by the third and final match between former UFC Light Heavyweight Champion Tito Ortiz and MMA legend Ken Shamrock, the two-hour broadcast averaged a 3.1 overall rating, with a 2.8 average in the first hour and a 3.4 average in the second hour.

UFC Ratings Record Book Gets Re-Written in One Night

Previously, the highest-rated UFC broadcast of all time was the live season finale of The Ultimate Fighter 3, which drew a 2.0 overall rating on June 24th, 2006. There was previously one other occasion when the UFC drew a 2.0 overall rating for a live Spike TV broadcast (the live season finale of TUF 2), and this was also the case with three separate pre-taped episodes of The Ultimate Fighter (two episodes from the first season of the show, along with the season premiere of TUF 3). However, the highest-rated broadcast in terms of overall viewership was the live season finale of TUF 3.

All of those records have now been demolished by UFC: The Final Chapter. The ratings expectations for The Final Chapter within Spike TV were that the show would break the 3.0 mark, which would have sounded like an insanely unrealistic goal if it weren't for the fact that the show was headlined by a fight between Tito Ortiz and Ken Shamrock.

Though the fight itself lasted less than three minutes, the time period that contained the actual Ortiz-Shamrock fight itself and the pre-fight introductions drew an enormously impressive 4.3 rating.

That breaks down to an amazing 5.7 million viewers for the fight. This shatters the UFC's previous record for the number of people watching a UFC fight at any given time. The previous record was 3.4 million viewers, despite repeated claims by Zuffa that the first fight between Forrest Griffin and Stephan Bonnar was watched live by ten million viewers.

Quarter-Hour Ratings Show Growth Throughout the Show

As is always the case with live UFC broadcasts on Spike TV, the least-watched quarter-hour was the first.

The first fight on the broadcast was Matt Hamill's victory over Seth Petruzelli, which started off with a 2.4 rating at the beginning of the fight and proceeded to grow by an unusually high margin to a 3.0 rating at the end of the fight.

Jason MacDonald's victory over Ed Herman drew a 2.8 rating, while Kendall Grove's victory over Chris Price drew a 3.1 rating.

As expected, the Ortiz-Shamrock fight led to a massive jump in the quarter-hour ratings, as the fight itself drew a rating of 4.3.

The Ortiz-Shamrock fight ended at 9:44 PM Eastern Time, and approximately one-third of the viewing audience did not stick around for the post-fight interviews, as the rating for the final quarter-hour of the broadcast fell to 3.0, which is still a tremendously successful quarter-hour rating.

Demographic Ratings Even More Impressive than Overall Rating

In the specific viewership demographics that the UFC and Spike TV make an effort to target so that they can boost their revenue with the sale of TV commercials, The Final Chapter performed even more impressively than the 3.1 overall rating would suggest.

In the 18-to-49-year-old male demographic, the previous all-time record for any complete UFC broadcast was a 2.9 rating for the live finale of TUF 3. The Final Chapter averaged a 4.5 rating in this demographic, far eclipsing the previous record.

In the 18-to-34-year-old male demographic, which is the UFC's primary audience and is also the demographic that advertisers across many industries are struggling to reach, the previous all-time record for any complete UFC broadcast was 3.8 for the live finale of TUF 3. The Final Chapter averaged a whopping 6.0 rating in this demographic.

To put this number in perspective, the UFC broadcast averaged 1.6 million viewers in the 18-to-34-year-old male demographic, which was greater than the 1.1 million viewers in the same demographic who watched the baseball playoff game between the A's and the Tigers.

While the average viewership of the baseball game was significantly higher when it comes to overall viewers (7.8 million to 4.2 million), there can be no doubt that drawing such a huge rating in the 18-to-34-year-old male demographic will open a lot of people's eyes and will bring many new advertisers into the mix for the UFC in the future.