WWE: News On This Week’s Raw & Smackdown Live Viewership

This week’s episodes of Raw and Smackdown were the first of the so-called “New Era.” Smackdown is now live on Tuesday nights on the USA Network, and each brand has their own unique rosters. Due to this, as Vince McMahon has told us, both shows should be competing for ratings, merchandise sales and more.

Well, the ratings are in for this week’s Raw and Smackdown, so lets see who won!

Monday’s Raw averaged 3.338 million viewers. This is a 6.5% increase from last week’s episode of Raw which averaged 3.133 million viewers. It was a terrific episode of the “flagship show”, so it definitely deserved the increase in viewership that it received.

Tuesday’s Smackdown Live averaged 2.743 million viewers. This is a 14% decrease from last week’s episode of Smackdown which averaged 3.170 million viewers. These numbers for Smackdown are a bit deceiving though, as last week’s episode was so high due to the WWE Brand Extension Draft that was held. It was inevitable that the viewership numbers for Smackdown would decrease the following week and they did. However, 2.743 million viewers is still quite a good number for Smackdown as it is 39% higher than Smackdown’s viewership from two weeks ago.

Thanks to PWTorch for the numbers.

Mark’s reaction: I usually don’t care too much about ratings. However, now that Raw and Smackdown are competing brands again it is interesting to see how things played out viewership-wise after week one of the split rosters. Although I don’t expect Smackdown to beat Raw in the ratings anytime soon, I do think they’ll do better than they’ve previously done now that they’re live on Tuesday nights on a station like the USA Network.