Professional wrestling’s television ratings continue to evolve with the current entertainment landscape. In the early 2010s, WWE Monday Night Raw would regularly pull in upwards of five million viewers on a weekly basis. TNA iMPACT! never struggled to hit seven figures. Even the often taped WWE SmackDown still held a comfortable 2.0 rating in the key demographics. With streaming services becoming the primary source of televised entertainment and cord-cutting at an all-time high, live sports are essentially the last ratings driver for cable television. Even then, WWE programming now sits in and around 1.5 million viewers while top competitor AEW battles to hit seven figures every week.
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While viewership will inevitably continue to gradually decrease over the years, there are still a couple of circumstances in the wrestling world that pop, or flop, a rating.
CM Punk Boosts WWE Raw Viewership
Fans tuned in in droves to see what the Second City Saint had to say.
Jimmy Traina of Sports Illustrated reported that WWE Monday Night Raw drew an average of 1.884 million viewers, an increase of over 300,000 from the previous week’s episode. This is the highest-viewed episode of WWE Monday Night Raw since August 7th, which was a show that dealt with the fallout of WWE SummerSlam, the second-largest premium live event of the year.
In the ratings department, WWE Monday Night Raw scored a 0.66 in the 18-49 demographic. That rating was the highest for WWE Monday Night Raw since the post-WWE WrestleMania 39 episode on April 3rd.
Beyond Punk, WWE Monday Night Raw had boosts in the form of Randy Orton’s televised return and the WWE Survivor Series fallout.
AEW Dynamite Defeats WWE SmackDown
The unprecedented numbers began at the end of last week.
WWE SmackDown brought in 789,000 viewers and a 0.24 rating on its November 24th episode. By comparison, AEW Dynamite drew an audience of 845,000 with a 0.26 rating two days prior. This marks the first time that AEW has defeated a WWE main roster show in viewership and ratings.
It’s worth noting that last week’s WWE SmackDown was on FS1 instead of its usual broadcast home of FOX. FS1 is available in 71.375 million homes while AEW Dynamite‘s channel, TBS, is in 78.842 million homes (via Sports Business Journal, July 2023).
AEW Dynamite returns to television tonight at 8 PM ET on TBS.
