Iron Ring: Good Ratings, New Audience, Interesting Strategy

The numbers aren't that much lower than many episodes of the sixth season of Ultimate Fighter, and there are more viewers than any other MMA programming has had to date.

UFC usually draws about a 71-percent male audience. It is consistently strong with men between 25-34, and big fights can beat any sport but the NFL in that age group on any given night. To a lesser extent, it draws from the 18-24 and 35-49 audience.

UFC draws few children and not all that many teenagers, and has a hard time catching on to the older generation that has yet to accept MMA as a legitimate sport. If you attend a UFC event, it's impossible not to notice the audience is predominately white and very trendy.

"Iron Ring" draws 52 percent women, and half the television audience on the debut shows that aired from 11 p.m. to midnight was younger than 24. The fighters are not all African-American, but there is little doubt that is the prime fan base they are trying to reach.

They are clearly aiming at a demographic that has not yet been captured by UFC, and thus far are successful at getting a new audience to watch their show, but for a different reason than why fans watch other MMA organizations.

Their target audience is one who already knows about conflicts with Ludacris and T.I. and can see their different philosophies on the screen when it comes to tryouts and picking fighters, which the early episodes have been based on. Whether they can turn those viewers into paying consumers, creating their own unique sustaining fan base, is the ultimate question.

They were there when UFC started from scratch, and they were behind the meteoric rise on pay per view from late 1993-96, when people like Ken Shamrock, Royce Gracie, Tank Abbott, Don Frye and Dan Severn became stars. The original UFC was an amazing success story for a promotion that had no free television to build its shows. McLaren and Isaacs also were there through its spectacular politically-induced fall to oblivion from 1997 to 2000. When UFC was in its original growing phase, people would talk with McLaren about how he was on the ground floor of creating a new sport.

His response was always that the worst thing that could happen to UFC was for it to be a sport. Isaacs noted the concept with "Iron Ring" is more WWE-oriented. They hope to create their own new fighting stars with the Kimbo-Slice-streetfighter aura and progress to live pay-per-view events, official soundtracks and merchandising built around the celebrity coaches.

While virtually every MMA promoter will privately say they look at the WWE as the goal as far as building an organization, they are quiet to say it publicly for fear their fan base considers wrestling a dirty word.

Isaacs said they have no interest in being just another company getting into bidding wars for perceived top-10 fighters.

"You want to get into bidding wars with Dana White and the Fertitta brothers, well, good luck," he said.