Monday’s episode of WWE Raw was built around Ronda Rousey’s first match on television and led to the show dropping by a slight margin from last week’s viewership.
The three-hour episode averaged 2,800,000 viewers on the USA Network, down 3% from last week’s figure of 2.9 million viewers. This week’s show was still Raw’s second-highest figure since April 30th.
The show opened with 2,830,000 viewers and had a small increase up to 2,854,000 in the second hour and dropped 4.4% in the third hour to 2,728,000 viewers.
The final hour led up to Rousey’s match with Alicia Fox, with the match officially beginning at 11:05 pm and the show went off the air at 11:11 pm.
It’s difficult to assess Rousey’s match as we don’t have quarter-hour breakdowns, but the third being lower than last week’s final hour for such a big event has to be disappointing.
UPDATE: POST Wrestling was informed from someone with access to the viewership breakdown that the overrun segment featuring Rousey vs. Fox did a 2.5 rating compared to the overall show that did a 2.2.
Raw was the most-watched show on cable Monday night, beating out the top cable news programs.
If your main concern is the ratings, that match can’t be at 11 PM Eastern. Apparently WWE feels that it’s more important that Ronda be portrayed as the main event than simply catching the most eyeballs live last night. Can’t say I disagree with that line of thinking in the long term.
I’ve never been a big fan of judging the wwe based on the ratings mostly because I realize that tv ratings as a whole are going down not just WWE. The fact of the matter is that most weeks, WWE raw does better ratings then pretty much every show on the CW and those shows are considered successful, so I doubt wwe is losing sleep over a 2.5 ratings as It’s considered a pretty good rating in today’s landscape.
Something that i found interesting, despite the low ratings, was the number cable show in the 18-49 ratings with a 1.0 and in the overall ratings, the second hour was number 3 l while the first was number 7 and the third was number 9 so raw is still doing pretty well by those number and if they are low numbers.