By Jason Powell, ProWrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet)
Wednesday’s AEW Dynamite television show produced 833,000 viewers for TBS, according to Showbuzzdaily.com. The viewership count was down from the 921,000 viewership total from last week.
Powell’s POV: Dynamite finished fourth in the 18-49 demo in Wednesday’s cable ratings with a 0.32 rating, down from last week’s 0.33 in the same demo. Monday’s WWE Raw finished with a 0.38 rating on USA Network. Two NBA Playoff games on TNT topped the cable ratings, and an NBA pre-game show finished third. The May 5, 2021 edition of Dynamite delivered 1.09 million viewers and a 0.42 rating in the 18-49 demographic for a show headlined by a Blood & Guts match.
NXT Black & Gold doesn’t draw under the AEW banner any better than it did under the WWE banner.
6 straight weeks of sinking ratings, a clear level of 20%+ dropoff from a year ago, and no amount of “dream matches” and “huge announcements” can save them.
If Tony doesn’t hire a real booker and get the hell out of the way, then we’ve already seen the peak of AEW. A good booker could sift through that roster and build a compelling TV product with the potential for mainstream appeal. The crackhead trust fund douchenozzle will never be able to do that.
It’s not just AEW; professional wrestling in general faces an uphill navigation that may be too steep to overcome.
Raw and Nitro in 1995-1996 were not putting on consistently good shows and the work-rate on those shows was often fair to sloppy, with the occasional gem mixed in. In spite of any of that the TV ratings on those episodes blow away any of these shows now, and that was prior to wrestling really taking off becoming something that mainstream viewers were tuning into.
Now how many other modern forms of viewing content and the method of measuring those options I can’t account for.
Lowest rated segment of the show was Q7, aka THE DREAM MATCH. Two flippy midget jackoffs tanked an already low viewership number.
Q1: 857k
Q2: 873k
Q3: 866k
Q4: 863k
Q5: 831k
Q6: 828k
Q7: 773k
Q8: 774k
The drop from Q4 (3 promo segments) to Q5 (Jericho v Santana) was bad and probably caused by both things. The drop from Q6 (backstage segment, 2 promo segments, start of DREAM MATCH) to Q7 (DREAM MATCH, 2 promo segments) is probably a combo of those two no charisma, no physique, no selling midgets and everyone doing a promo not having any mic skills.
Spare me the BS about anyone other than the kool-aid contingent of anti-WWE smarks liking what AEW is doing right now. It’s terrible shit and the stuff that the cokehead jackoff owner thinks will be huge is the stuff that drives real pro wrestling fans away.