Bellator 115 took place on Friday night at the Reno Events Center in Nevada and the card was headlined by Vitaly Minakov defeating Cheick Kongo by unanimous decision to retain the Bellator heavyweight title.

According to Nielsen sources, Bellator 115’s preliminary live viewership landed at 828,000 total viewers.

This number is up 16 percent from last weeks Bellator 114, which drew 711,000 viewers and this is the second largest audience this season. The peak viewership of the broadcast came at 10:55 p.m. ET during the main event and had 1,131,000 viewers and this is the third time this season that the preliminary ratings have had a peak viewership over 1 million.

With the viewership from Friday night, the average audience of this season is 713,000 and this is above the season nine Friday night average of 652,000.

When it came to the competition on cable, Bellator went up against WWE Smackdown on SyFy, which was the last show before Wrestlemania and had 2.71 million viewers. The top sports programming of the night came from ESPN, which was second game of their NBA double header and had 1.75 million viewers.

The preliminary television ratings for this season of Bellator are below.

Bellator 110: 880,000

Bellator 111: 653,000

Bellator 112: 699,000

Bellator 113: 507,000

Bellator 114: 711,000

Bellator 115: 828,000

Stay with TheMMAReport.com for ongoing coverage of the Nielsen ratings battle between Bellator MMA and the UFC.