WWE’s Monday Night Raw this week saw a huge decline in viewership compared to the previous episode last Monday. Going by statistics provided by Showbuzz Daily, the episode in question drew an average of 1,527,000 viewers on the US Network. This is a sharp decline from the previous figure of 1,736,000 just a week ago.
This worryingly for the company set an all-time record for viewership. The previous low coming in July of this year. It is highly probable that a lot of potential viewers were lost due to Raw having to compete with Monday night football that featured the Baltimore Ravens and The Cleveland Browns. This game reportedly drawing in just over 12 million viewers on ESPN.
Interestingly last week’s episode of AEW Dynamite outperformed Raw in the key demographic of 18-49. This will be a huge concern for WWE and a huge chunk of optimism for AEW. Raw did 0.49 in one hour, 0.44 in the following two hours, meanwhile, AEW had a rating of 0.57.
Is this a significant moment? Well, for it to be so I believe it will have to be repeated many more times before AEW can start getting excited about any potential shift of power.
The reason this particular demographic is key is that this is where the future lies and these stats do indicate that more and more people are willing to make an emotional investment into AEW. It will be very interesting to see what the next month’s viewership will look like and see how both companies react.
Will Tony Khan put his foot down on the pedal and take control of this small momentum or will the WWE start to panic and look to revolutionize how they do things?
Let us know in the comments. How significant are these figures and could they indicate something more serious for the industry?
