Posted in: Sports, TV, WWE | Tagged: ratings, wrestling, wwe
WWE Raw Gets Massive Viewership Bump After Ditching Paul Heyman
It looks like Vince McMahon was right all along. For the first episode of WWE, after WWE fired Paul Heyman and consolidated its creative team for Raw and Smackdown under Bruce Pritchard, viewership was way, way up on Monday night, according to the numbers from Showbuzz Daily. In fact, last night's episode of Raw had the highest viewership the show has seen since early April, and yes, all of that happened without needing to have The Ratings King of Friday Nights, Baron Corbin, on the show.
Raw Rating Steady, Viewership Increases
In the 18-49 demographic, Raw scored a .53 rating across all three hours, with individual hours coming in at .56, .53, and .49. That's on par with last week's show, which had hours rated .55, .55, and .49. Raw's three hours took the fourth, sixth, and seventh spots on the top 150 cable shows chart, beaten by 90 Day Fiance and Below Deck Mediterranean.
But in terms of viewership, Raw averaged out to 1.939 million viewers, with hourly totals of 1.982 million, 1.996 million, and 1.838 million viewers, respectively. That's a big deal for a couple of reasons. Firstly, viewership actually went up slightly from the first hour to the second hour, and second, the third hour didn't seem to drop off a cliff like it has the past few weeks, which would have been a lot higher on average if not for that dropoff. That means people tuned into Raw, liked what they saw, and stuck around and stayed awake.
The Bottom Line 'Cause Chad Said So
All of that is to say that WWE did a better job of keeping viewers interested this week, and they did it without Paul Heyman. Does this indicate that Vince McMahon was right all along, and what the people want really is cuckold storylines and lots of shenanigans from Vince's best friend, R-Truth? The only answer The Chadster can come up with is: yes!