Posted in: AEW, Sports, TNT, TV, WWE | Tagged: aew, AEW Dynamite, bleeding cool, cable, dynamite, NXT, ratings, streaming, television, tv, wrestling, wwe
NXT Scores Spiritual Victory as AEW Wins in Ratings and Viewership
Before I get into talking about the ratings for AEW Dynamite and NXT, I want to address a matter important both to me and, I imagine, to my dedicated readers. Yesterday, my colleague Jude Terror took over my ratings beat while I was out sick, not, as Mr. Terror claimed, with "anal bleeding," but to be perfectly honest, because I had drunk too many Mango-flavored White Claw hard seltzers the night before and wasn't feeling up to writing much during the day. Look, what can I say? The Chadster loves to "partay". Disturbingly, however, Mr. Terror used this opportunity to make jokes about the ratings, making the ridiculous claim that because WWE Backstage scored a higher rating than the replay of 1987's WrestleMania 3, that meant that CM Punk is a bigger draw than Hulk Hogan. That's just preposterous. This was a replay of a 30-year-old wrestling event and you can't just take those numbers and twist them suit some biased narrative. The ratings are about facts, numbers, and math, and that's how I plan to look at the NXT vs. AEW Dynamite ratings released today.
Now, getting back to business, NXT scored a spiritual victory in the ratings Wednesday Night as fans tuned out of AEW Dynamite in droves, presumably to see what Triple H and Shawn Michaels were up to with their big announcement on NXT, which turns out to have been the reveal of NXT Takeover: In Your House. Yes, it's true that Dynamite scored higher in both the demographic ratings and the viewership numbers, but both numbers were down from last week, and that can only be considered a win for WWE and NXT.
AEW ranked 15th place with a .23 rating in the 18-49 demographic and 654,000 total viewers, according to Showbuzz Daily. That's down from last week's 12th place with a .28 rating and 728,000 viewers. NXT, on the other hand, was ranked 46th with a .15 rating and 604,000 viewers, down from last week's 33rd place with a .18 rating and 663,000 viewers. But, again, that's not taking into account the moral and spiritual victory, which clearly went to NXT.