AEW Dynamite down from last week, but still win in ratings over WWE NXT
This week's AEW Dynamite once again pulled out the Wednesday Night ratings win over WWE NXT. AEW Dynamite averaged 773,000 viewers, which was down from last week's 845,000 viewers. In the 18-49 key demo, AEW finished No. 6 with 0.30 rating. WWE NXT averaged 707,000 viewers, which was up from last week's 615,000 viewers. NXT finished No. 28 in the 18-49 demo with a 0.18 rating. When we look further into the combined numbers for both shows in comparison to other wrestling programming, things become even more interesting.
AEW Dynamite and WWE NXT combined beat Hour 3 of this week's RAW
This week's WWE RAW was heavily promoted to feature Asuka against Sasha Banks for the RAW Women's Championship and WWE Champion Drew McIntyre against Dolph Ziggler in the main event. Despite those matches, Raw finished with its second lowest rating of all time with 1.62 million viewers. Hour 3 of Monday Night RAW finished 1.46 million viewers which is slightly below the combined number for WWE NXT and AEW Dynamite this week.
This week's AEW Dynamite featured the AEW debut of Matt Cardona, Cody vs. WARHORSE for the TNT Championship, an AEW World Tag Team Titles match and a fun sprint of a No Disqualification Tornado Tag Team Match in the main event. On NXT, the show featured a women's division opening tag team match, Johnny Gargano vs. Roderick Strong, the return of the Undisputed Era and a NXT North American Triple Threat qualifier. The combined number for both shows for Wednesday July 29 was 1.48 million viewers.
The struggles of the WWE main-roster TV shows has been well documented over the past few weeks. With the departure of Paul Heyman and promotion of Bruce Pritchard being in charge of both shows, RAW and SmackDown feel more similar than every before. Regardless of the fans' enjoyment of either show, the ratings prove that something may have to change soon.
No matter which show fans are watching on Wednesday night, this proves that over a million wrestling fans are tuning in for both WWE NXT and AEW Dynamite. The high quality programming of both has more consistency to their ratings than both RAW and SmackDown recently.