By Jason Powell, ProWrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet)
WWE issued the following press release to tout the increases in viewership of the 2024 WWE Crown Jewel event.
November 4, 2024 – WWE®, part of TKO Group Holdings (NYSE: TKO), today announced that Saturday’s Crown Jewel event from Riyadh saw a 28% viewership increase vs. 2023, marking a new record as the most-viewed WWE event ever from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Additionally, the sixth annual Crown Jewel sold out Mohammed Abdo Arena in Saudi Arabia’s capital city.
The event was highlighted by the introduction of the Crown Jewel Championship Titles which were decided by champion vs. champion matches. Undisputed WWE Champion Cody Rhodes outlasted World Heavyweight Champion Gunther in the main event and Women’s World Champion Liv Morgan defeated WWE Women’s Champion Nia Jax to capture the inaugural Crown Jewel titles.
Powell’s POV: The Crown Jewel Championship concept didn’t do much for this viewer, but it apparently resonated with the masses to some degree.
Yeah… I doubt it was the dumb big titles that did it haha
They clearly didn’t hurt. That’s a huge increase.
Belts probably helped a little. I think that people have just accepted the Saudi shows now. People used to skip the shows but I’m not sure anyone does that anymore. These shows are also more important than they uses to be
yeah it’s a nice increase , the problem however is they tell you it was up 28% from last year but they don’t give you the number it was up from….( which might be telling) just as an example lets say the live viewership from 2023 was 100,000 well that would put this years up around 130,000, again that’s just an example.
They did the same thing with bad blood saying it was the 4th most watched non major wwe event and money in the bank which was up 46% in viewership but again no numbers.
I’m not harping on them since i was one of viewers but in a realistic logical sense if the numbers are as great as they claim they’d probably be touting the actual number… without knowing more it could just be a sales and marketing ploy based on certain aspects of the truth.
Right now raw and Smackdown are right around their normal averages which usually fall between 1.2 and 1.6 million viewers.. pre wrestlemania/rock where they went all the way up t0 2.3 and 2.4 million ranges .
I know there are many people who think they are getting super high viewership numbers for their ple’s ( and who knows they could be) my best guess would be the live viewing and the after the fact viewing would be greatly different…remember it only takes a click just like a youtube video to count as a view, so it would also be intersting in my opinion to know how many unique views vs. actual minutes watched… but I doubt we’ll ever know.