Viewership for both AEW and NXT was hit hard on Wednesday continuing the trend displayed by Raw and SmackDown of declines among the empty arena shows.
AEW averaged 685,000 viewers on TNT for their show from an ‘undisclosed location’, believed to be the One Fall Power Factory in Norcross, Georgia.
Dynamite was down 16% from last week and would be AEW’s lowest number of 2020 and third-lowest since the show’s launch in October. In the 18-49 demo, AEW did a 0.25, which was down 26% and was 37th for the night among cable programming.
NXT averaged 590,000 viewers on the USA Network and down 12% from last week. The show was 74th for the night on cable with a 0.15 in the 18-49 demographic.
AEW was down in most of their key demos except for adults over 50 and women 12-34, which were both even with last week’s ratings.
NXT has another taped show next week that includes the Johnny Gargano vs. Tomasso Ciampa match and the six-way women’s ladder match. AEW has advertised the start of their TNT Championship tournament with Cody taking Shawn Spears.
It’ll be interesting to see what the numbers are like next week as AEW has the start of The TNT Championship tournament while NXT is starting their Takeover matches.
Last couple of weeks, both shows were aimless as I don’t think they knew what would be going on. Now they both have advertised in advance with possibly major shows?
Could be that people might start getting fed up with all the Corona news and just want to escape from it possibly for a little time?
I’ve watched wrestling for 30+ years and this confirms to me that I’m not alone in the fact I just don’t give a crap about wrestling right now. I was enjoying everything before the pandemic for the most part but real life is just dominating everything. The Roman situation should’ve never been just up to Roman. AEW is trying but the big debuts just feel wasted and just adds to me not caring. I won’t be giving up on wrestling but those are just a few of my reasons why I just don’t care and it seems like I’m not alone in it.
Georgia and Florida have both had slack rules until today or yesterday. The Georgia governer said YESTERDAY he just learned this can be spread through asystamatic people (Probably damage control, but still, WHAT THE FUCK?)
Yeah I just can’t really get into the shows either. AEW at least feels a bit more loose. WWE/NXT without a crowd is horrible. Just feels like robots going out there to perform.
Or for AEW is it the Matt Hardy/Chris Jericho and Dark Order shit that is the cause of the decline? I guess we’ll probably never know but it is the reason I have given up on Dynamite.