Versus sees new viewers for MMA
Sergio Non:You talked about bringing a different audience to UFC. What are the differences between the viewing audience on Spike…
Sergio Non:You talked about bringing a different audience to UFC. What are the differences between the viewing audience on Spike or a pay-per-view, as opposed to Versus?
Jamie Davis (President of Versus): We carry fewer sports than some of the other sports networks, but … we have very passionate fan bases in there.
So for example, when you come to Versus, we are still the largest hunting and fishing network in the nation. In addition that, we have this very passionate hockey audience. In addition to that, we have this very passionate IndyCar racing audience. We have the PBR audience. We have a college football audience as well. And the Tour De France, for example, as well.
What we work very hard to do is to heavily promote within the other sports, each others’ sports. So, for example, we’ve been promoting very heavily this fight coming up this Sunday all throughout the Tour De France.
We did the same thing for the March fight, in the hockey games that we were doing, and in the IndyCar series, and in the PBR, etc. Some of those audiences are those that are traditionally not viewers on Spike, for example, and therefore we bring a new audience to UFC who are loyal fans on Versus.
SN: How much cross-pollination have you actually seen between sports? How many, say, hockey fans or racing fans have become MMA fans?
JD: We’ve seen quite a bit. The proof in the pudding is the fact that we’ve been the fastest-growing national sports cable network since 2007. 2007 was the best year on the network ever. We blew it away in 2008. 2009 blew that away. And again, are on pace to do so again in 2010.
One of the contributing factors has been the fact that we have been able to take new audiences coming out of the network and then cross-promote them to other sports to help to be able to grow all of the sports, and therefore the overall network.
For example, 2009 was the most-watched year ever for field sports — that’s the hunting and fishing — on Versus, even more than when we used to be Outdoor Life Network, or OLN, when we were 24-7 hunting and fishing. Which has shown that we’ve been able to bring new audiences into the network and cross-pollinate them into that.