By Jason Powell, ProWrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet)
Wednesday’s AEW Dynamite television show averaged 496,000 viewers for TBS, according to Brandon Thurston of Wrestlenomics.com. The viewership count was down from the 512,000 viewership average of last week’s show. Dynamite finished with a 0.09 rating in the 18-49 demo, down from last week’s 0.10 rating in the same demo.
Powell’s POV: The HBO Max streaming numbers are not included in the rating or viewership count for AEW programming. Last Tuesday’s NXT on The CW averaged 532,000 viewers and a 0.08 rating in the 18-49 demo. One year ago, the December 4, 2024, edition of Dynamite on TBS delivered 586,000 viewers and a 0.17 rating in the 18-49 demographic.
I’m not being tribal. I have concerns about the downward trend in wrestling viewership for both WWE and AEW. But 496K viewers has to be cause for concern. And if the HBO Max numbers were that significant, they would announce them.
Both companies have taken a hit due to the new ratings formula, but I wouldn’t be too concerned about WWE’s numbers. They’ll be fine. Even if Netflix opts out of the domestic Raw after five years, WWE will land on its feet with another lucrative media rights deal, even if it’s not as lucrative as this one.
AEW’s numbers are concerning, especially for Collision. The Max numbers are a mystery, even to AEW. Apologists speculate they do bigger numbers on HBO Max than on TBS/TNT, while detractors claim they get little or nothing on the streaming side. Personally, I suspect they do okay because I know several people who made the switch to Max over TV, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near the numbers that Dynamite does on the television side. That said, I’m guessing like everyone else.
I disagree to some extent with the idea that the HBO Max numbers would be released if they were significant, only because you don’t see WBD releasing streaming numbers for much of anything. They put out combined streaming/TV numbers for successful shows like Welcome to Derry, but I haven’t seen any actual standalone streaming numbers. Where there’s some truth in what you’re suggesting is that if the Dynamite combined numbers were impressive, WBD would find a way to tout them. Even then, they might be leery of putting out the combined numbers, just because they know the TV viewership averages are released, so people could just subtract the TV numbers from the combined numbers to figure out the streaming total. Hopefully, it’s just a matter of time before Nielsen starts releasing streaming data.