Posted in: Fox, Sports, TV, USA Network, WWE | Tagged: bleeding cool, cable, fox, NXT, pro wrestling, ratings, Raw, Smackdown, streaming, television, tv, usa, wrestling, wwe

Retribution Hacks Raw Ratings, Makes It Look Like Viewership Dropped

When The Chadster first saw those hooligans in Retribution trying to mess with WWE Raw and Smackdown, I figure it was all just in good fun, blowing off that teenage angst that the group's members are all feeling, what with being stuck at home with their parents during the quarantine and not allowed to go out to the vape store without wearing a mask. Sure, knocking over a box here or there, setting a generator on fire, breaking a window, beating up a car, or chainsawing the ring ropes is just normal, healthy rebellion. Kids being kids.

But now, these no-good anarchists are taking things too far! The ratings for WWE Raw have come in from Showbuzz Daily, and despite everything WWE has been doing — Raw Underground, having Randy Orton murder legends like Ric Flair or Shawn Michaels, letting Seth Rollins cut forty-five minute promos, prominently featuring ninjas — I would expect ratings and viewership to have gone up, probably by a lot! But instead, viewership fell last night, down in to the bottom five lowest numbers ever!

And then I got to thinking about it, and I realized that this is probably the work of Retribution too. Just like those little brats messed with the Raw production truck last night, I'll bet they messed with Neilsen's ratings data too! That would certainly explain how Raw fell 1.722 million viewers on average last week to 1.643 million this week. That's off hours of 1.730 million, 1.697 million, and 1.502 million. Keep in mind that Raw Underground and that appearance by ol' H-B-Shizzle didn't happen until the third hour, and you just know that there's no way the viewership fell by 228,000 people from the first to third hour of Raw. If anything, I would think that probably a million more people would tune in to see what Shane McMahon was up to.

And here's further proof: despite the supposed viewership drop for Raw (The Chadster onto you, Retribution), the rating in the 18-49 demo actually went up. Okay, so we're supposed to believe that Raw's demo rating went up from a .47 average to a .48 average and they still lost 25,000 viewers on average? Shyeah, right. And you're telling me that despite that demo increase, Raw fell to the 9th, 10th, and 13th spots for its three hours last night? There's no reality where any of this is even remotely believable.

So yeah, it looks like Retribution hacked the Raw ratings last night and now it looks like Raw did really badly, but don't worry, The Chadster assures you Raw actually did much better than that. Hopefully, WWE does something about these kids by SummerSlam so that Raw's ratings can reflect how great the show really is, especially as WWE starts the new Thunderdome era.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!