Women’s MMA Draws Eyeballs to Strikeforce Card

The Staff at MMAJunkie are reporting that Strikeforce Challengers 9 drew 197,000 viewers on Friday, July 23, but peaked at 254,000 for the night’s co-main event between Sarah Kaufman and Roxanne Modafferi.

Ratings for this past weekend’s Showtime-televised Strikeforce Challengers 9 event proved solid as the show averaged an audience of 197,000 viewers, an industry source today confirmed with MMAjunkie.com.

The peak audience actually came for the night’s co-main event, a title fight between women’s welterweight champ Sarah Kaufman and challenger Roxanne Modafferi that spiked with 254,000 viewers.

Payout Perspective:

These Challengers shows have so much potential to help Strikeforce build its roster and hype its fighters. I’m still not sure what the hang-up is in terms of delivering the additional marketing and PR needed to create a buzz and tell the story of some of these fighters. If it weren’t for the slam by Kaufman, no one would be talking about this event.

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Perfect timing, isn’t it? Here I am saying yesterday that there probably isn’t enough interest in women’s MMA to make it commercially viable, but then Kaufman-Modafferi turns out to be the peak of the event.

Does this fight change anything? I’m not yet convinced it does. The peak for a women’s title fight was still only 254,000. If we look to women’s boxing as some sort of parallel (with a much longer track record), it never became the type of commercial entity that men’s boxing did.

If anything, the slam is further support for the idea that women lack much of the speed, strength, and damage threshold that make MMA so dynamic and exciting. The Kaufman slam pales in comparison to Rampage-Arona (or even Harris-Branch), which perfectly summarizes the difference between the two sports and why women’s MMA has such a tough row to hoe.

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• Sarah Kaufman vs Roxanne Modafferi – Strikeforce Challengers 9 Full Fight Video
• Sarah Kaufman Talks Head Slam Win
• Sarah Kaufman and Roxanne Modaferri – Behind the Scenes Before Strikeforce Challengers 9
• Roxanne Modafferi Is Pure Class
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Tags: kelsey philpott, MMAJunkie, Roxanne Modafferi, Sarah Kaufman