WWE News: Raw Viewership increases for "Wild Card Rule"
What's the Story?
Monday Night Raw's viewership was on the rise following the return of Daniel Bryan, Roman Reigns, Vince McMahon and WWE Champion Kofi Kingston.
The May 6 edition of Monday Night Raw averaged 2.24 million viewers and was up from last week's average of 2.16 million.
In Case You Didn't Know...
WWE was up against two NBA playoff games on Monday night with the Milwaukee Bucks-Boston Celtics game beginning an hour before Raw, while the Golden State Warriors and Houston Rockets game began in the second hour of the show.
The show was up 10 percent from last week's record low viewership from the April 29 episode, with over 132,000 more fans tuning in for the first hour.
The Heart of the Matter
Raw finished fourth for Monday night cable behind the NBA, beating out Love & Hip-Hop: Atlanta and the NHL.
The following is the hourly breakdown for the first episode of Raw for May 2019 per ShowBuzzDaily:
Hour one: 2.468 million
Hour two: 2.240 million
Hour three: 2.024 million
Raw was down 8.3 percent from last year's episode on May 7, 2018, which averaged 2.69 million viewers for the Raw after Backlash, which featured Finn Balor defeating Reigns and Sami Zayn in a Money in the Bank Qualifying match.
The first hour had much stronger viewership than last week and featured McMahon announcing two WrestleMania rematches and the "Wild Card Rule" that will allow Raw and SmackDown superstars to appear on different shows.
Over 444,000 viewers tuned out by the end of the third hour, but the WWE Championship match between Bryan and Kingston retained 126,000 more viewers than last week's drastically low episode.
One factor that may have lead to the decrease in viewership may have been the segment with The Usos and The Revival, which many are already comparing to horrendous segments from previous years like "Lashley's Sisters" and "Bayley: This is Your Life."
What's Next?
The Money in the Bank pay-per-view is two weeks away, which usually means the Raw before the pay-per-view will lose viewership.
With the introduction of the Wild Card Rule, viewership trends may change if the right superstars show up on the flagship show.