I loved BattleBots over a decade ago when it was on Comedy Central, but I never understood why it was on a comedy cable channel. It always felt like it should be on the now defunct G4TV or SyFy (SyFy did air the Robot Combat League in 2013). But alas Comedy Central wanted to actually focus on Comedy due to it’s namesake, something cable TV stations seem to rarely do these days, and cut unrelated programming like my beloved BattleBots. Comedy Central wasn’t the only TV channel to cut programming of robots fighting, BBC also cut it’s show “Robot Wars” around the same time. It was a gloomy era bereft of robots fighting to the death, but now 13 years later robots are back in the cube and dueling it out to determine a champion.

Battling robots still, unfortunately, doesn’t seem mainstream though. There aren’t teen girls taking Instagram selfies with them or teen boys hanging up posters of their favorite robots or teams. It was clearly a gamble on a show concept that long-ago died and couldn’t find life in the few cable channels that have tried to revive it since [“Robot Combat League” – SyFy (2013), “RoboGames” – Science Channel (2011)], so what made Disney owned network powerhouse ABC decide to renew the show for a second season? To answer that question I could point out the 158,000 likes the show has on Facebook or the tens of thousands of views each video they upload gets, I could point out the 5,000+ subscribers to the dedicated sub-reddit or the fact that several posts regarding the revival of the show made Reddit’s frontpage. But instead I want to show you just 4 simple charts that might shed some light on to why and also to what could be the revival of a genre, and the rebirth of a new popular sport.

Did you watch BattleBots? If so what would you like to see in Season 2? (comment below).

1. Google AdWords

This shows the approximate monthly search volume for a term. BattleBots went from almost nothing at all to 201,000 searches in their first season. Comparing it to programming that aired on network and cable channels we see that BattleBots came in above the popular cable channel programming and just below the 2 established network programs running during the same time frame.

2. Google Trends

Sticking with Google supplied data we can also see what the trends there are between shows. For this view I selected network tv show “American Ninja Warrior” and cable tv / internet tv darling “Last Week Tonight”. Here we see BattleBots (the blue line) dominating the cable TV show (orange line) and doing really well against the more established network show (red line). Google trends is a formula used to determine the trending popularity between search terms. You can learn more about how it works here.

3. Twitter Tweets Per Day

Topsy tracks all tweets on Twitter and measures how many tweets per day use specific hashtags. For this view I compared the hashtag #battlebots (orange line) with that of 2 shows that aired on the same day of the week throughout the shows run, #humansamc and #lastweektonight. BattleBots performed amazingly well against these cable shows, but also flexed it’s metallic muscle against the more established #AmericanNinjaWarrior (shown in the second view on the orange line, battlebots is in blue here).





4. Nielsen TV Ratings

Finally we have the all important (for broadcast tv) Nielsen TV ratings. Here we see the weak spot in BattleBots, the actual TV ratings. Here BattleBots (blue line) is impressive in it’s first week beating out the established Big Brother and American Ninja Warrior broadcast programs, however, it quickly loses points for the next 3 weeks not climbing again until closer to the tournament’s end. Conversely the other 2 shows remained fairly stable with ANW eventually gaining a higher rating. There’s a myriad of possible reasons for the ratings dip. Perhaps viewers discovered that the BattleBots YouTube channel had full versions of the show online and watched it there instead, perhaps they only watched the fights with none of the drama on the Facebook channel, or maybe viewers were pulled by other programming like the US Women’s Soccer team. Whatever the reasons this graph shows us that BattleBots has what it takes to compete with the more established network summer programs and that it might even be able to beat them next year. ABC could broadcast the tournament’s live like most other sporting events and ask their sister channel ESPN to provide coverage, finally treating fighting robots like a real sport. They could even simulcast on services like Xbox, PS4, Twitch.tv, and other’s to get more reach.