WWE News: Monday Night Raw viewership sees significant decrease
What’s the story?
This week’s episode of Monday Night Raw averaged 2.685 million viewers and was down 128,000 from last week’s average of 2.813 million.
In case you didn’t know...
Yesterday kicked off WWE Week on the USA Network which will include a first-time ever broadcast of NXT on Wednesday, December 13th and the annual Tribute to the Troops episode on Thursday, December 14th.
The biggest takeaways from this week’s Raw episode were the Raw Women’s Division fighting off Absolution, Roman Reigns successfully retaining his Intercontinental Championship against Cesaro and the No. 1 Contender’s match between Braun Strowman and Kane, which ended in a no-contest.
The heart of the matter
The following is the hourly breakdown of the December 11th edition of Raw:
Hour one: 2.876 million
Hour two: 2.608 million
Hour three: 2.570 million
The drop from hour one to hour two resulted in a loss of 268,000 fans and was the biggest drop in viewership for the show. The change from hour two to hour three was a much lower decrease than usual with only 38,000 fans tuning out.
The December 11th edition of Raw was the lowest viewership the program has averaged since the May 30 episode, which was building to the Extreme Rules pay-per-view and featured Samoa Joe versus Bray Wyatt versus Finn Bálor and Reigns versus Seth Rollins.
Raw’s viewership has remained under the three million viewership mark since the last show in November and will likely see a further decrease as the weeks progress during the holiday season.
What’s next?
There are no matches currently announced for next week’s show on December 18th, but many fans aren’t expecting anything exciting or any major storyline developments until the first Raw of 2018.
Next’s week Raw will also be up against Monday Night Football and six NBA games – three that will begin prior to the start of the show and three that will begin at the same time as Raw’s broadcast.
Author’s Take
The difference in quality between last week’s show and yesterday’s show was astonishing.
Unless the writing improves for the month of December, Raw may experience massive declines as the end of the year draws closer.