Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano belongs close to the highest of MMA’s cultural milestones, Netflix and MVP mentioned the occasion peaked at practically 17 million viewers globally, whereas the U.S. peak was 11.6 million, which was sufficient to reset the American MMA viewership mark. That places it in uncommon air for the game, and in girls’s MMA historical past.
Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano Drew 17 Million Viewers on Netflix, Setting an MMA Mark
Carano, the early mainstream face of ladies’s MMA from the Strikeforce years, and Rousey, the athlete who took girls’s MMA into the UFC and made it a major-force tv property. Carano is a pioneer who boosted the visibility of ladies’s MMA from 2006 to 2009, whereas Rousey was the primary lady signed by the UFC and the promotion’s first girls’s bantamweight champion. Put merely, Carano helped open the door, and Rousey kicked it off the hinges.
The U.S. numbers beat the previous MMA benchmark set by UFC on Fox 1, which peaked at 8.8 million viewers in 2011. For years, that was the quantity everybody pointed to when speaking about reside MMA on community TV, and it stood as a high-water mark for the game’s attain. The Netflix occasion additionally averaged 12.4 million viewers on the primary card globally, in line with Netflix and MVP, which makes it greater than a novelty.
- Bob Sapp vs. Akebono — 54 million viewers
- Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano —17 million international peak viewers
- 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: Demetrious Johnson vs. John Dodson — 5.2 million viewers
In girls’s MMA history, the combat sits in a lane alongside a number of turning factors: Gina Carano’s Strikeforce run, Ronda Rousey’s UFC debut towards Liz Carmouche at UFC 157, and the rise of fighters who adopted them into greater promotions and higher paydays. Rousey and Carmouche gave the UFC its first girls’s combat in 2013, and that second remains to be a key line in any WMMA timeline. Carano’s title combat with Cris Cyborg in Strikeforce was one other landmark, as a result of it put a girls’s bout on the heart of a significant present earlier than the UFC had even dedicated to the division.
For MMA, the occasion is now a benchmark for streaming-era attain.
