Rebney On State Of Bellator: “We are in a spectacular position right now as a company”

Added on Mar 29, 2011 by John Petit in

UFC & MMA

It wasn’t 6 months ago that MMA “media” (bloggers) were claiming that Bellator Fighting Championship was on the ropes, and would never see 2011. Months later CEO Bjorn Rebney announced a deal they had signed with MTV-2 to run the next 3 seasons of Bellator on the network. They are now 3 weeks into the first season, and Rebney sat down with Sherdog to talk about how all the changes were going.

As far as the ratings are concerned Rebney seems very happy with the numbers so far, and says he knows MTV-2 is happy with them as well. He said “They were real happy with the first and second weeks. Last week of course we battled ‘March Madness’ and an earlier start time, so the numbers dipped a little bit, but that’s to be expected.” He continued “That’s just the nature of the game. Saturday nights have some great advantages to them, but there’s a lot of action going on Saturday nights, specifically during the March time frame.”

He went on to say that the MTV-2 partnership was like a match made in heaven. Rebney stated “They know the space. The MTV network guys have been in charge of and running Spike since its infancy. They get MMA better than anybody in television. They know how to shoot it, they know how to produce it, they know how to promo it. They’re an awesome partner.” Rebney went on to say that the deal they have with MTV-2 is imperative tot he success of the company. He said “That’s the catalyst. If you look at where the UFC was and where the UFC has gone, you can argue back and forth, but the single greatest catalyst they’ve had is ‘The Ultimate Fighter’ on Spike. That week-in week-out same-time same-place channel development and partnership is the key to building a mixed martial arts organization.”

Rebney made sure to mention the distinction between the audience Bellator was going after was different then the target the UFC was seeking. Rebney said “We’re drawing a much different demographic on MTV2 than what the UFC is drawing both to the pay-per-views and to their Spike programming. And it’s a very attractive demo. It’s a socioeconomically impressive young male demographic that skews younger than the demographic watching ‘The Ultimate Fighter’ and tuning into pay-per-views.” He went on to say there is plenty of room for both of the organizations to co-exist, he said “When you have content, you have a show that can week-in and week-out deliver hundreds of thousands of young male consumers — which is kind of your key, key, key consumer that advertisers are trying to reach in this country and across the world — there’s not reason to believe that we couldn’t live in great harmony, leveraging the expertise of the people at MTV networks, who have helped build the UFC out to where it is, and build this brand out under the same corporate umbrella.”

Rebney concluded by saying that the company was moving ahead just as they had planned, and that it was reaching its financial goals ahead of schedule. He said in closing “We are in a spectacular position right now as a company, as a corporate entity because we’re not bleeding. We had great investors behind us when I launched this company in 2009. Those investors believed in the business model I put in front of them in terms of how long it would take to get to a cash flow break-even position where we wouldn’t require any more capital to continue putting on shows and putting on events. We got there. We actually got there literally about 60 days before I had projected we would get there.”