By Jason Powell, ProWrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet)
The AEW Rampage television show delivered 502,000 viewers for Friday’s episode on TNT, according to Showbuzzdaily.com. The number was down from the previous week’s 622,000 viewers.
Powell’s POV: Rampage finished 15th in the 18-49 demographic in Friday’s cable ratings with a with a 0.17 rating, down from last week’s .25 in the same demo. While two MLB games topped the cable ratings with 3.982 million viewers and 2.618 million viewers, the numbers for Rampage are lousy regardless of the competition, and the timing is certainly bad for AEW heading into to the 30-minute head to head with WWE Smackdown on Friday night.
7 straight weeks with a drop in viewership and less than half of what the CM Punk debut show pulled. Dynamite is also down to below what the first episode with Punk delivered.
At what point does Tony Khan,and all the AEW apologists/wrestling media for that matter, admit that the product they’re putting out there isn’t a draw?
They promised a sports based promotion and instead gave us a high budget indy fed with bad versions of sports entertainment storylines. There are 8 million people who stopped watching wrestling over the last 2 decades. Clearly those people aren’t going to come back for idiotic spot fests, a moron putting his hands in his pockets, 97 factions, and no rules being enforced at any time.
We were promised a revival of pro wrestling and instead we got its death knell.
F… off, drama queen and switch the channel.
Ah yes, another Cocaine Tony simp who can’t figure out a single way to defend the product. Cry some more, bitch tits.
Not in disagreement about the ratings drop and I’m mixed on the quality and presentation of the actual show and am giving it some time to see if adjustments are made, but as for people coming back they could replicate NWA, AWA, and ROH or a perfect hybrid between the three as a purist wrestling product and they are not going to realize the boom period of many years past.
Entertainment, or what passes for it, is very saturated (and also diluted) regardless of what screen people view from or play on and there is only so much attention-span to go around.
Nothing else has dropped the way AEW is right now. Sports viewership, especially the NFL, is actually up compared to 2019. The nights that have more competition actually drive up viewership across the board, except for wrestling and especially not for AEW.
It’s a serious industry problem for wrestling right now, and neither company is doing anything to stem the tide.
NXT. Ratings there have declined a pretty good bit as well. It’s not just an AEW problem. They don’t have CM Punk appearing weekly, which does make the Rampage numbers a little more disappointing. I think Rampage is in a horrible time slot to see what it can really do.
NXT is right where they’ve been for a few months now. They’re actually higher than they were in August before the move to NXT 2.0. They’ve been consistently been in the 600-700k range for 2 years now.
That’s a copout. The actual number one shows in television (not shows bragging because they won 10 minutes in their demo in their timeslot) are doing just as good as any shows ever have. When wrestling was good it was competing at the top.
I was wrong last week. I thought that was bottom.