WWE News: All-Time Low Viewership Numbers for Monday’s Raw, Notes on Production, More

The WWE Monday Night Raw viewership numbers are in and they are not good. In fact, they are the lowest viewership numbers in WWE Raw history according to Showbuzz Daily. The three hour average was 1.53 million viewers with a 0.41 rating in the 18-49 age group. The numbers come from Nielsen.

The breakdown of Raw’s three hours looks like this:

* Hour One 8pm: 1.63 million viewers

* Hour Two 9pm. 1.51 million viewers

* Hour Three 10pm. 1.44 million viewers

The Wrestling Observer reports that Raw had its lowest first hour, the lowest second hour, and the lowest third hour, so it shows that people weren’t turned in early and you can see by the numbers that around 200,000 tuned out by the third hour. They also reported that last week’s AEW Dynamite beat all three hours of Raw in the 18-49 and 18-34 age groups with a 0.49 rating.

Last week’s Raw did 1.74 million viewers with a 0.51 rating in the 18-49 age group. According to the Wrestling Observer, Raw was down 12 percent in viewers, 20 percent in 18-49, and 29 percent in 18-34.

The NFL game on ESPN that saw the Baltimore Ravens defeat the Cleveland Browns in what was a great game did 12.42 million viewers, which is not a season-high and last week’s game did a higher number.

While you can blame the NFL game for some of it, WWE still can’t be happy about the total number of viewers.

For comparison sake, last year’s Raw on December 16 did 2.05 million viewers, so that’s about 500,000 less people watching this year.

There are two more weeks of NFL Monday Night Football games on Monday nights. There’s also the college football championship in early January. After that, WWE’s numbers should go back up closer to the 2 million viewer range.

TJR Thoughts: This is not good news obviously and the guess here is that Vince McMahon is going to be in a cranky mood this week. We don’t report the ratings every week, but when you do ALL-TIME LOW numbers then I have to write about it. Something has to change from a creative standpoint because what they are doing isn’t working. As I wrote in my Raw Deal review, there were some good segments on the show, but there’s a lot of bad stuff too and some of it so poor that I wonder how it can even make it to television. I also think that if AEW’s Dynamite show this week beats Raw in the 18-49 demos (like Dynamite did from last week) then they’re going to brag about that big time and so will certain members of the wrestling media that have an agenda when they report this stuff. It can also be said that ratings don’t matter as much as they used to because fans can consume content in different ways and that is true, but it’s still a bad sign when you get a number of viewers as low as this.

Smackdown airs on FS1 this week, which should lead to a much smaller audience for them as well. It will probably be around 1 million viewers instead of the 2 million plus viewers they typically get on the main Fox channel.

Production Notes from Monday’s Raw

The following info comes from PWInsider’s Mike Johnson about Monday’s Raw.

* This week’s show was what was originally written for it although there were specific things that changed during the course of the day. There was re-writing of dialogue in certain promos as well. It was described as a Vince McMahon show with a source stating that the writers gave him what he wants.

* There was a Keith Lee vs. Miz match originally scheduled for Raw that was changed to Lee losing to Miz and John Morrison by countout. It was originally going to be Miz vs. Lee in a singles match with Johnson noting that Lee wasn’t going to win that match either. That means WWE felt the need to change it to a handicap match to beat Lee rather than singles.

* Even though it has been going on for months now, the plan is for Retribution to continue to try to make Ricochet try to join the group.

* The storyline injury for Lana will likely keep her out of the ring for 3 or 4 weeks. There has been some buzz that perhaps she was taken out to bring back Charlotte Flair for TLC on Sunday, but PWInsider hasn’t confirmed if that is the plan. (I’m pretty sure it is the plan, for the record.)

* Raw had several segments run long, so the ending of Raw was a bit rushed and apparently management wasn’t happy about some segments running long.

That’s it from their report.