Published: Jul 12, 2018 by Liam | Last Updated: Jul 12, 2018 by Liam
Liam has been reporting & analyzing wrestling news for over eight years, and is currently the Managing Editor at WrestleTalk.com. Immersed in wrestling for 18 years, he has over 11,000 published articles in addition to leading and overseeing WrestleTalk.com's coverage.
Welcome to the newest edition of the weekly “let’s all have a moan about how bad WWE‘s TV ratings were this week” series!
The latest editions of Raw and SmackDown Live were the final before this Sunday’s WWE Extreme Rules pay-per-view, so I ended last weeks report with a sense of optimism that the viewership would take a turn for the better this week.
It’s time to see how wrong I was in this week’s WWE Raw and SmackDown Live TV ratings report.
Last week’s (July 2) episode of Raw drew 2.707 million viewers, an increase on the previous week. This was despite no matches being announced prior to the show.
There were no matches advertised for this past Monday’s iteration either, but there was, of course, the promise of the final build for Extreme Rules.
This didn’t help though, as only 2.470 million people tuned in to this week’s show. The lowest viewership figure in the history of Raw.
The previous low was achieved in September of 2016, which clocked in at 2.478 million viewers.
Oh dear.
Here’s the hourly breakdown of this week’s Raw:
- 8 pm hour – 2.582 million
- 9 pm hour – 2.508 million
- 10 pm hour + overrun – 2.320 million
Source: ShowBuzz Daily
In lighter news, SmackDown Live also happened.
Last week’s (July 3) blue brand show saw a mere 2.013 million people tune in. This was the second worst viewership since SmackDown went live, with the lowest being 1.921 million in November, 2016.
Before this week’s show, the following was advertised:
- Miz TV with Team Hell No
- Asuka vs. James Ellsworth in a Lumberjack match
- Tye Dillinger vs. Samoa Joe (which didn’t happen)
- Sin Cara vs. Andrade Almas
- AJ Styles vs. Shinsuke Nakamura
This was enough to secure an increase to 2.183 million viewers, which is now the joint third lowest of 2018.
SmackDown Live definitely got the better of Raw this week, all things considered.
Source: ShowBuzz Daily
Summary
Basically, Raw did rubbish and SmackDown did fine.
That’s all I can say really.
But before we all have a meltdown, I’d heavily recommend this article on Seeking Alpha, highlighting why we shouldn’t read too much into WWE‘s TV ratings nowadays.
It’s still nice to have moan every now and again, though isn’t it?
What do you make of this week’s ratings? Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter here. You can also join us on Discord to chat with Oli, Luke, the magazine team, the website writers and each other here!
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