Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano is close to the head of MMA’s cultural milestones, with Netflix and MVP saying the occasion peaked at practically 17 million viewers worldwide and 11.6 million within the U.S., which was sufficient to reset American MMA viewership information. It is a distinctive state of affairs for the game and within the historical past of girls’s MMA.
Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano units MMA file with 17 million viewers on Netflix
Carano, who was the early mainstream face of girls’s MMA since her Strikeforce days, and Rousey, the fighter who introduced girls’s MMA to the UFC and made it a serious drive TV property. Carano was a pioneer in elevating the profile of girls’s MMA from 2006 to 2009, whereas Rousey was the primary lady to signal with the UFC and the promotion’s first girls’s bantamweight champion. Briefly, Carano helped open the door and Rousey kicked the door off its hinges.
The U.S. numbers surpassed the outdated MMA benchmark set by the UFC on Fox 1, which peaked in 2011 with 8.8 million viewers. For years, this was the quantity everybody pointed to when speaking about reside MMA on community TV, and it stood as a excessive water mark for the game’s attain. In keeping with Netflix and MVP, the Netflix occasion averaged 12.4 million viewers on the primary card worldwide, and it is greater than only a novelty.
- Bob Sapp vs. Akebono — 54 million viewers
- Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano — 17 million peak viewers worldwide
- UFC on Fox 1: Cain Velasquez vs. Junior dos Santos — 8.8 million peak viewers
- EliteXC: Kimbo Slice vs. James Thompson — 7.281 million viewers
- UFC on Fox: Rashad Evans vs. Phil Davis — 6.7 million viewers
- The Final Fighter 3 Finale: Tito Ortiz vs. Ken Shamrock — 6.524 million viewers
- The Final Fighter 10 Finale: Kimbo Slice vs. Roy Nelson — 6.1 million viewers
- UFC 75: Quinton Jackson vs. Dan Henderson — 5.811 million viewers
- UFC on Fox 6: Demetrius Johnson vs. John Dodson — 5.2 million viewers
This battle is a crucial occasion within the historical past of girls’s MMA, together with a number of turning factors. Gina Carano’s rise in Strikeforce, Ronda Rousey’s UFC debut in opposition to Liz Carmouche at UFC 157, and the rise of fighters who adopted them with larger promotions and higher paychecks. In 2013, Rousey and Carmouche introduced the primary girls’s bout to the UFC. That second stays an essential line within the WMMA timeline. Carano’s title battle with Cris Cyborg at Strikeforce was one other milestone that put girls’s competitors entrance and middle on main reveals earlier than the UFC entered the division.
For MMA, this occasion is now the benchmark for attain within the streaming period.
