By Jason Powell, ProWrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet
WWE Friday Night Smackdown finished with 2.084 million viewers for Fox, according to Brandon Thurston of Wrestlenomics.com. The number is down from the previous episode’s 2.169 million final viewership count (and way down from the 2.499 million overnight number that was released on Saturday morning).
Powell’s POV: Friday’s Smackdown delivered a 0.58 rating in the 18-49 demographic. Smackdown joined Raw and AEW Dynamite in having their overall viewership numbers drop last week despite not having competition from the Tokyo Olympics. The July 23 edition of Smackdown was the last show to air prior to the Tokyo Olympics and delivered 2.310 million viewers and a 0.66 rating in the 18-49 demo.
Jason maybe you can answer this how could the final number that off from the saturday morning number ?
There was talk on Saturday of NFL preseason game numbers from a couple of Fox affiliates being included. Given the big decline, I assume that turned out to be accurate. Overnight numbers are what they are. Showbuzz Daily returned today and announced that they will not be running them going forward. I included the paragraph below from their full statement announcing their return at https://showbuzzdaily.com/articles/were-as-surprised-as-you-are.html
“The biggest is that we’ve made the decision to no longer post morning preliminary broadcast network ratings. That’s not connected to our technical difficulties, we just feel like those numbers, which are available only to the tenth of a rating point, have increasingly little meaning when broadcast 18-49 ratings are now almost entirely within a narrow range, roughly 0.5-1.0. In addition, Nielsen had already adopted a policy of not reporting preliminary ratings for major live events like sports and awards programming. And of course the preliminary ratings for Monday-Thursday are superseded by finals a few hours later anyway. We will continue to post broadcast finals and cable ratings on our traditional schedule.”
Thanks I thought maybe some of the preseason nfl numbers could be part of it