Monday’s episode of Raw fell back down to Earth after their largest audience of the year one week ago with the Raw Reunion special.
This week’s show averaged 2,321,000 viewers on the USA Network. The decline from last week isn’t a fair comparison because of the nature of last week’s show, but this week’s episode was their least-watched Raw of the summer and lowest since June 24th. If you compare to Raw from two weeks ago, which was a ‘normal’ show, they were down 5.4% in average viewership.
Raw began with 2,407,000 viewers, which was a good level for their first hour and third-highest opening hour since May 27th. The show fell 3.5% in the second hour to 2,324,000 and experienced another drop of 4% in the third hour with 2,233,000 viewers. The final hour featured the Seth Rollins vs. Dolph Ziggler match and subsequent injury angle involving Brock Lesnar’s appearance, which wasn’t advertised by the company the Samoan Summit segment involving Roman Reigns and Samoa Joe.
Year-over-year, the show was down 20% in total viewership from the same week in 2018.
I would also say storylines matter. I watched the opening of Smackdown this evening. After every match they announced, I thought “Don’t care”. I turned the channel to the democratic debate for something interesting, and I’m a proud Trump supporter.
Guess Roman in the Samoan Summit also wasn’t a big draw. I mean you are right they don’t have any/many stars. Becky is really the only one, she has no good matchups and right now a woman cannot carry the company.
I thought both Raw and Smackdown were solid shows this week.
Part of me is starting to think pro wrestling has a niche audience, and we won’t ever see a big boom period again regardless of the quality of the show.
Ratings for TV in general are not what they used to be. I think the shows are just too many hours a week for most people to want to follow with all the other options out there.
I’d argue wrestling is in a boom period… It’s just not WWE at the center of it. They have their fans and are a giant machine that are sustaining themselves.
The boom is across the world, where indies (and new major players) are selling our every weekend in every major city. It’s the fact that talent are making living outside of the WWE system, and thriving too.
WWE may be niche, but professional wrestling is winning over new fans every week at a much more grassroots level.
You’re equating sporadic shows on smaller platforms to an unhot product that is still making vastly more revenue than all those selling out groups combined.
Smaller shows that, per capita, have experienced far more growth in the last five years than WWE has when look strictly at tv ratings and arena crowds.
I’d also say, in a completely random point of discussion that I am sure is rocky to argue, but think it’s close enough to make the case… World wide, if you combine the attendance of all non-WWE events, month after month, they probably are more or close to equal, what WWE draws.
My point is that wrestling is very hot right now. Whether WWE reflects that with tv and house show attendance or not, has nothing to do with the fact that the industry is doing very good.
Wrestling is not hotter than ever. It’s not really drawing in younger fans. Yes there are smaller Indy’s and smaller promotions popping up with good ground support but overall wrestling as a whole just isn’t that hot
