Wednesday Night Wars 07/22/2020 Ratings

Neither Dynamite or NXT were labeled as special episodes this week like Great American Bash or Fight For the Fallen. It was just a straight head-to-head competition between the two largest wrestling promotions in the U.S. And this week, AEW came out ahead. (See graph above.) Here are the details.

• AEW was able to ride the momentum from its Fight For the Fallen episode last week and improve its ratings even further. The show's audience grew by another 7.2%, increasing from 788,000 viewers last week to 845,000 viewers this week. This is the first time Dynamite has had more than 800,000 viewers since May. Similarly, the show's 18-49 demographics rating also went up by a notable amount. It went up from 0.29 last week to 0.32 this week.

• Unlike its AEW competition, NXT's saw a drop in viewership this week. It went down from 631,000 last week to 615,000 this week. That's a decline of 2.5%. NXT's audience already fell sharply the previous week. So the fact that it fell again instead of rebounding is not a good sign for WWE. But with that said, NXT saw a signicant increase in its 18-49 demographics rating despite the smaller audience, and that is always important. It went up from 0.14 last week to 0.17 this week.

AEW winning again this week is not surpising. After all, both brands have recently proven that it can get the upper hand on any given week. What is a little unexpected, however, is the margin that Dynamite won by. The AEW show had 37.4% more viewers than NXT. There hasn't been such a large margin between the two shows since March 2020. Also, for the second week in a row, AEW's Wednesday night audience grew while WWE's shrank. This is definitely a bad trend for WWE to be in. NXT's recent winning streak in the ratings proved that it definitely has the capability to pull in an audience, but WWE's problem has always been keeping casual fans interested for an extended amount of time. This is especially evident in the case of Raw and Smackdown as shown in those shows' ratings.

The large difference in ratings between the two Wednesday night shows this week may have been due to the cards presented. On TNT, AEW gave us a TNT Championship match, a fantatsic Falls Count Anywhere match between the Young Bucks and the Butcher and the Blade, and the return of Sammy Guevara. Over on the USA network, Shotzi Blackheart took on Aliyah, we saw the first round of triple threat matches to crown a new North American Champion, and the main event was Dominik Dijakovic versus Karrion Kross. There weren't any particularly surprising moments from either show, but the matches on Dynamite were notably more captivating.

As for Raw and Smackdown this week, WWE did see small upticks in the ratings, but those ratings are still generally at all time lows.

• Raw's ratings last week were at its all time lows. This week, they did improve, but the size of Raw's audience was still the second lowest in the history of the show. It went up from last week's 1,561,000 viewers to this week's 1,628,000 viewers. That's an increase of 4.3%. The show's 18-49 demographics rating, on the other hand, headed downward even though there were more viewers this week. It went down from 0.48 last week to 0.46 this week.

• Smackdown's ratings this past week barely changed. Its viewership went up from 1,900,000 last week to 1,912,000 this week. That's an insignificant increase of 0.6%. The show's 18-49 demographics rating remained steady at 0.5, the same as last week's. This was WWE's go-home show before its Extreme Rules pay-per-view this past weekend, but it didn't seem to help in terms of ratings.

With Dynamite's victory this week, the tide in the Wednesday Night Wars seems to have once again turned. AEW is now back to its winning ways with two victories in a row. This makes Dyanmite's win-loss record 33-8-1 for viewership and 41-1 for the 18-49 demographic. Correspondingly, NXT's win-loss record is now 8-33-1 for viewership and 1-41 for the 18-469 demographic.