Wednesday Night Wars 05/06/2020 Ratings

As we discussed last week, both Dynamite and NXT tried to put their best foot forward this week. As a result, both shows were able to improve their ratings. Despite NXT featuring two championship matches, however, Dynamite ended up coming out ahead in this week's edition of the Wednesday Night Wars. (See graph above.) Here are the details.

• Dynamite's audience increased from last week's 693,000 viewerws to this week's 732,000 viewers. That's an improvement of 5.6%. As for the show's 18-49 demographics, its rating was 2.8. That is up slughtly from last week's 2.7.

• NXT's audience grew by a similar margin, going from 637,000 last week to 663,000 this week. That's an increase of 4.1%. The show also saw an improvement in its 18 to 49 demographics rating. It went up from 0.16 last week to 0.18 this week.

Dynamite aired its first live episode after several consecutive weeks of pre-taped shows. It featured a match with World Champion Jon Moxley, the return of its bigger stars like Nyla Rose and MJF (although MJF didn't actually wrestle), and a main event "street fight" bout between Kenny Omega/Matt Hardy and Chris Jericho/Sammy Guevara. This tag team match was the AEW in-ring debut of Matt Hardy, and it definitely disappoint if you are a Matt Hardy fan. It contained elements from his YoutTube channel as Hardy morphed between different personas throughout the match. The gimmick wasn't as obviously cinematic as WWE's recent boneyard match, but it was just enough to make things more interesting and make Hardy's debut memorable. All of this ended up being very effective as that part of the show drew in very strong ratings, especially compared to NXT

Seeing how AEW was going live this week, WWE seemed to try to counteract this by presenting its audience with a stacked card this week. Not only was there the in-ring debut of Karrion Kross, but the show also had both the Men's NXT Championship and Women's NXT Champtionship on the line. NXT Champion Adam Cole faced Velveteen Dream after ducking Dream's challenge for weeks. Plus, Women's Champion Charlotte Flair faced fan favorite Io Shirai. While the matches looked good on paper, there was nothing especially noteworthy during the matches themselves, especially with the Women's Championship match ending in a disqualification. So although the show saw a bump in the ratings, the increase wasn't anywhere close to being big enough to give NXT the victory this week.

Elsewhere in the wrestling universe, the other two major wrestling shows on television both continued to nose dive in their ratings.

• For Raw, its viewers fell from 1,817,333 last week to 1,686,000 this week. That's a drop of 7.2%. Its 18-49 demographics ratings fell from 0.51 to 0.46. These are the lowest numbers the show has EVER seen. Given that the show has been on the air for a whopping 27 years, that is saying something.

• For Smackdown, its viewers fell from 2,005,000 last week to 1,885,000 this week. That's a drop of 6.0%. Its 18-49 demographics ratings remained the same as last week's at 0.5. Like Raw, this is also the show's worst ratings in history. And when you consider the fact that the show is aired on a broadcast network which has a much larger general audience, these numbers are especially bad.

Although both Dynamite and NXT were strong shows this week, AEW once again came out on top. This makes Dynamite's win-loss record for the Wednesday Night Wars 25-5-1 for viewership and 30-1 for the 18-49 demographic. For NXT, the record is 5-25-1 for viewership and 1-30 for the 18-49 demographic. Even though this week's AEW victory wasn't by a very large margin (Dynamite had 10.4% more viewers), it does extends Dynamite's winning streak to three which definitely puts momentum on their side.