Wednesday Night Wars 07/15/2020 Ratings

Just as NXT had momentum on its side with three victories in a row, Dynamite was able to stop NXT's winning streak thanks to its Fight For the Fallen episode this week. (See graph above.) Here are the details.

• AEW made a big comeback with this week's episode of Dynamite. The show's viewership shot up by 10.2%. It went up from 715,000 viewers last week to 788,000 viewers this week. And although it wasn't by as large a margin, the show's 18-49 demographics rating also went up. It rose from 0.28 last week to 0.29 this week. If you believe Chris Jericho, this increase was thanks to the newly appointed "demo-god".

• NXT's, on the other hand, saw a huge drop in ratings this week. Its viewership decreased from 759,000 last week to 631,000 this week. That's a massive decline of 16.9%. Even though Dynamite's ratings went up significantly this week, it was more so this NXT decline that ended the show's winning streak in the ratings. And perhaps even more important than this drop in viewership, NXT's 18-49 demographics rating took a huge tumble as well. It fell from 0.20 last week all the way to 0.14 this week.

As previously mentioned, this week's episode of Dynamite was presented as Fight For the Fallen, a traditionally pay-per-view show for AEW. It featured two championship matches, Jon Moxley versus Brian Cage for the World Title and Cody versus Sonny Kiss for the TNT Title. There were also two very noteworthy tag team bouts. The Lucha Brothers versus FTR showcased some great tag team wrestling with a unique ending, and the Elite versus Jurassic Express very nicely advanced the characters of Kenny Omega and Hangman Page.

Over on the USA network, even though this week's episode of NXT wasn't presented as a pay-per-view level show like the last two weeks', it still featured two championship matches. There was Tegan Nox versus Io Sharai for the NXT Women's Championship, and Keith Lee took on Dominik Dijakovic for the NXT and North American Championships. In addition, Karrion Kross has now entered the title scene as the ground work for a feud between Kross and Lee was niely set up.

This week's results in the ratings was a little surprising. Dyanmite's improvement in the ratings was somewhat expected due to the World Championship match. However, the fact that NXT's ratings fell by such a large margin was a surprise. From the show's past track record, NXT has always had a loyal core fan base. Even though that base may largely consist of the 50+ demographic, they have always tuned in to keep the show's audience size relatively consistent. But this week, NXT's viewership dropped to its lowest level since May 20th. This may be simply due to Dynamite's special episode this week, or it may be a sign that WWE is beginning to lose its core audience base. After all, just look at the continuously falling ratings for Raw and Smackdown. It will be interesting to see where the show goes from here with next week's ratings.

In regards to the other two major wrestling shows on television, it was once again bad news for WWE in terms of ratings.

• Raw's ratings continues to free fall this week, reaching their lowest point in the show's history. The viewership fell by another 7.5%, dropping from last week's 1,687,000 to this week's 1,561,000. As for the show's 18-49 demographics, the rating fell from 0.49 last week to 0.48 this week.

• Last week, Smackdown's ratings fell off a cliff as they hit their lowest point since moving to FOX. This week, the show did make a bit of a rebound, but its ratings still aren't close to where they were two weeks ago. The WWE show's audience increased from 1,777,000 viewers last week to 1,900,000 viewers this week. That's an increase of 6.9%. The show's 18-49 demographics rating also rose, increasing from 0.4 last week to 0.5 this week.

With NXT's winning streak ended, the Wednesday Night Wars just got a lot more interesting. It is now obvious that momentum can shift at the drop of a hat, and the competation between the two wrestling promotions is more fierce than ever as a result. (Just look at how NXT put on the Great American Bash to directly combat Dyanamite's Fyter Fest.) With this week's victory, Dynamite's win-loss record is 32-8-1 for viewership and 40-1 for the 18-49 demographic. This makes NXT's record 8-32-1 for viewership and 1-40 for the 18-469 demographic.