Vince McMahon is coming back to "shake things up." So I wouldn't say it doesn't matter to them at all. There's something that they're doing.

Vince boosts ratings, show lost 600,000 viewers between Vince and the third hour, but third hour is 400,000 more viewers than last week.

Yeah but they are a taped episode next week and will phone it in on New Years Eve, so whatever momentum they were hoping to build on is gonna be for nothing. The real test is gonna be the January 7th 2019 episode of Raw.

The January 7th episode will not be the test. They are going to be running head-to-head against the College Football Championship game. They are going to get slaughtered in the ratings that night and they already know it. It will be another phoned in episode.

The week after that is the one to watch imo.

The January 14th episode will not be the test. They are going to be running against a huge Duke/Syracuse College Basketball game and will get destroyed in the ratings.

The week after that is the one to watch imo.

Sadly, the only thing the rating pop will mean to Vince is he doesn't need to create new stars, he just needs more McMahons...

It'll be interesting to see what happens to those numbers now that another promise has been broken.

The genetic jackhammer is back!

RAW X-Mas Eve ratings were low, as expected due to holiday

It's as expected, but it still follows the "people would rather do something else" mold. I mean, WWE did throw in the towel with it and we live in post-DVR world. But I don't think ratings like these are harmless. If people get used to not watching Raw live and realize they have a better time doing other things, well...

Lowest ever?

Yeah

The show was #4 behind the NFL for the night, but they only got 0.55 share for the 18-49 demographic. As much as I find schadenfreude in their ratings getting lower and lower, that placement is probably the most important thing to them.

mnf is over now

RAW stayed below 2 million viewers again for NYE.

While the show will be live next week it is going up against the College Football Championship.

In terms of hourly declines, RAW did pretty well considering how small it was but then again they were also starting off with poor numbers.

Wouldn't be surprised if next week's bounce due to no holidays and MNF games doesn't come close to bringing back to what they did 3 weeks ago. 500k seems way too much to get back in a week and the hyped up changes promised already lost a lot of its luster for RAW.

They can pull another 1.1 million if they tweet out a Sasha/Bayley/Moon vs Riot Squad match for RAW.

There are the obvious excuses for ratings decreasing over the holidays, but are people really going to miss watching Raw? These dips are never good news, even if they are expected, because you’re bound to lose some weekly viewers who realize that they don’t care and never come back.

SD defeated RAW once again this week

There have been special event anomalies where SmackDown has defeated Raw in recent memory, haven't there? But is this the first time in a while that Smackers has bested Raw? Honestly, as hot as Becky is getting and with them actually giving her the John Cena push now, I can see things staying pretty close. At least until she wins the Royal Rumble and jumps over to Raw.

Yes but don't believe its ever happened twice in a row, at least since the first brand split era ended.

Even with the College football title game next week, slim chance the blue brand can pull it off for a third week in a row. Something like a 100-200k bounce should be enough for RAW to break that streak.

Shit, that's what I meant to ask -- if this is the first time it happened two weeks in a row since Heyman booked. Not sure if this is good or SmackDown or bad for Raw or inconsequential.

A lot more bad than good for both brands since Smackdown still heavily relies on needing a strong RAW to act as a lead in and isn't strong enough on its own to offset or carry RAW.

When Smackdown used to be on UPN & CW, it had some buffer against RAW's struggles due to having stronger Hispanic and African American markets that helped minimalize any losses RAW was causing to them. Pretty much helped keep the show at a more stable level in terms of viewership range while RAW was spiking a lot more harder in both directions.

They could be entering that situation again with FOX in a few months, but I can imagine casual fans liking this product. And there's not as much authentic representation as there once was. Rey Mysterio is around, but there's no Eddie Guerrero. Every Hispanic guy they push has this "Look! It's a Hispanic guy!" vibe to them.

One of those mixed Good/Bad type weeks.

The good being they got a nice sizable bump and that likely ends Smackdown's win streak.

The bad being they suffered a huge hourly drop as usual and got hammered in the rankings (7, 8, & 10) meaning viewers still didn't feel as interested in watching RAW after the college game turned into a blowout.

That 2 million viewer mark seems like a magic number. That being at 2 million for hour three means it’s probably going to dip further in coming weeks and months.

Same as last week?

Yep

They got the predictable big bump from no more football on Mondays for a while but the bigger news is the 3rd hour doing very well.

Just proof that when WWE actually puts in the effort into making the 3rd hour interesting, people are more willing to stick around to watch the entire show.

Raw lost 700,000 viewers from Hr 1 to Hr 3.
That has to be one of the biggest drops in the show's history

THE NEW ERA! IT'S WHAT THE FAN WANT!

According to the Observer, that set a new record for worst ever drop. Previous record was an episode from October 2017.

people are real excited for the Rumble

There aren't even any clear cut Rumble favorites. Rollins is the most heavily rumored name but even he's just been.......there.

WWE did a pretty miserable job with the build to the Men's Rumble.

Of the two, Women's Rumble has more interest on paper because of the possible routes WWE can go and crowds actually being interested in both Women's champions. Even then, WWE did a lazy job building up that match as well.

RAW actually went up compared to last week.

Its the yearly comparisons where it went down huge. Almost 700k less than last year's post-Rumble show and over 900k less than 2017's post-Rumble show.

Will be interesting to see where it goes next week, now that the RR is over and both WM main events are announced.

I can't see them going up, because of TV the way it is, but it'd be a pleasant surprise if they did.

So that one actually did go down?

Yeah

That’s...not good.

RAW rating is down from last week slightly

Might sound odd to say as a big fan of WWE/pro-wrestling in general, but my gut instinct is ratings will continue to go down for WWE.

I think ROH, MLW are sustainable where they are at, but I could see IMPACT, NJPW in US not doing great tbh if WWE doesn't. Haven't heard a lot about NWA recently either.

New all-time low for Smackdown's live era even though it does have the excuse of having to compete against the SOTU.

In terms of WWE itself, just an idiotic move by them to cool down what is arguably their hottest feud and star with the lame doctor storyline. Also doesn't help that WWE doesn't really have anything interesting going on for RAW and Smackdown besides the Bryan stuff and Men's Chamber feud.

I haven’t heard a lot about NWA in about 30 years.

I was actually going to add something like this to my last post, but decided not to for some reason. I just can’t see WWE’s ratings going up even if it gets good. I think they are somewhat locked into their slow decline.

For comparison, last year this week had 3.11 million viewers

Kind of bizarre to think if this show drops another 300k viewers on average between now and WM it will be only slightly above 2 million a week.

Clearly the lack of Jeff Jarrett hurt ratings.

Where's Lacey Evans at???

Think she's shown up a few times on Main Event but mostly as just a jobber similar to Nikki Cross on RAW.

Her lack of tv time is probably a mix of her having a bad showing at the Rumble and Creating having nothing for her which is insane considering she was only called up a few weeks ago.

Big rebound for RAW

Having a strong 1st hour really helped a lot considering more viewers tuned out of the show than last week.

I'm going to try to incorporate this metric as well going forward

RAW got a ratings boost this week for live TV, up .15 from last week

Will be interesting if word of mouth of the show actually being pretty good this week, will boost the ratings next week. I still expect them to shit themselves next week. They should bring Brock back next week.

Yay, I CAN'T WAIT for Triple H and Batista to take up 45 minutes of Wrestlemania with video packages, entrances, and the slowest most plodding match ever! Two men 15 years past their primes who need to be carried to good matches. Great.

Can't believe some people are actually exited to see this.

Lots of YT views for RAW this week

SD went up .10 from last week

Went down actually, last week was 2,269,000

lol my bad

Right now it's looking like the best match on the card. Pretty excited for a Batista return. Hope he brings some of that Drax persona in for WrestleMania. And Triple H always brings it. One of the most underrated wrestlers ever. Should be a great match.

Raw ratings for this week (credit - showbuzzdaily)

YT views for the episode

Only way WWE is ever going to fix RAW's 3rd hour struggles is if they revamped their entire creative process for the show.

RAW has too much junk or useless filler going on and them losing the overrun hasn't lead to any real noticeable improvements for the 3rd hour.

SD went up 10k viewers this week

YT views for SD this week

RAW up .5 from last week

Last week:

This week:

:lol:

SD bounces slightly up as well

Slight drop this week

For reference, Was a 3.31 last year this week

Down about 620,000 viewers

Surprised 3rd hour wasn't lower considering it was pretty boring and meaningless even by RAW's standards.

WWE probably could have been averaging around that 3 million mark for RAW's Road to Mania had they not made a mess with RAW's hottest storyline (Becky-Ronda) and simply just took a page from Smackdown on how to build feuds that are actually interesting.

3 hours and literally nothing happened.

RAW dropped 100k from last week

LOL it sucks bro

Watching RAW episodes is like watching re-runs of Golden Girl episodes.

770,000 less viewers than last year during this same week (last year was 3.36 million viewers at this time)

Not surprised since outside of the Reigns return episode and maybe 1-2 other episodes at most, this year's Road to Mania wasn't interesting. Maybe the worst in years from how lazy WWE was.

Even with them having 2 ppvs to prevent burn out for Mania feuds, WWE still made a big mess with their biggest storylines and half-assed building up everything else for Mania.

I wonder who Vince is gonna blame this time. Not like he can storyline wise blame the ratings on Baron Corbin again. That was a one time option that they could play, and within 2 months they pissed away the chance to actually make some changes. Instead they seem worse off to me now then when Corbin was the GM.

It's 12 days until Wrestlemania, multiple champs don't have a match, including the freaking WWE Champion. They overcomplicated the most interesting match they had so much it's insane.

Becky vs Ronda was the main event based on the build and fan excitement. In 2 short months they WWE'ed it up so much that the only justification for it to actually be the main event is because it's a historic first, not because it feels like the hottest thing going anymore.

I feel no excitement for Rollins and Brock, Finn vs Brock was far more exciting.

Either Seth wins and is a transitional champion for Drew to Roman, or Brock retains again because if there isn't a massive boost to the guy that beats him, then why beat him. Have him keep the belt and build somebody else to beat him at the next Saudi show.

Even Kofi, he is still super over, but they are really close to WWE'ing this one too. He got over naturally, and instead of just riding that wave, they had to make it about how Vince McMahon doesn't want a black champion without actually coming out and saying it, in a rehash of WWE doesn't want a small guy like Daniel Bryan as champion. 2014 = small, 2019 = black, and to WWE fans are too stupid to recognize that it's the same recycled storyline instead of simply letting it be about Kofi catching fire and becoming a star.

WWE has been nothing but incredibly lazy since they got their new TV deals. Either they are purposely in a holding pattern the last 12 months and will continue to be the next 6 months, wanting to make sure they have good TV for once their new deals start, or they got the new deals, saw their stock skyrocket, and just said "fuck it, we are super rich now and no longer have to put in any effort because who cares, we are set for years".

WASN’T? That’s it? Is WrestleMania this weekend!?!

Alright. Still one more week to go apparently. Still. Roman Reigns vs Drew McIntyre is a WrestleMania match. Holy shit, this is bad.

Is Kofi vs Daniel Bryan official? I at least like the story behind that from what I’ve seen.

Obviously the mystique of WrestleMania has slowly been declining year after year for the past decade+ but this year it just jumped off a fucking cliff.