UFC on Fuel TV 3 didn't exactly set the world on fire in terms of ratings as the current downswing in UFC viewership continued. According to MMA Junkie, the event pulled in about 87% of the viewers of the last Fuel TV card.

Here's the numbers via Junkie:

Tuesday's live broadcast of UFC on FUEL TV 3 drew 173,000 viewers.

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February's UFC on FUEL TV 1 event holds the all-time UFC-FUEL TV ratings record with 217,000 viewers, and April's UFC on FUEL TV 2 show ranks second with 197,000. However, UFC on FUEL TV 3 topped all four of the cable channel's previous preliminary-card broadcasts for UFC on FOX and UFC on FX events from earlier this year.

SBN coverage of UFC on FUEL TV 3

In addition to saying that the show beat out prelim broadcasts from the year, Junkie also mentions that it did significantly better than the UFC on Fox 3 prelims. I'm not really sure why there is an effort to put an unnecessarily positive spin on the ratings.

There's no real surprise to it being a bit of a dip from the previous efforts, the first had the benefit of the free preview weekend (which didn't extend to all providers) in addition to a much better main event in terms of name recognition. The second show had a good main event and a bit of a different timeslot, making for easy early evening watching and leaving viewers free to go out on Saturday night.

This show had little guys in the main event and I wouldn't have expected it to do as well as the last two Fuel events.

It is a little disheartening to know that football stadiums like Michigan Stadium have had almost 115,000 people attending to watch a game live though. But yes, Fuel availability is limited and all that.