Wednesday Night Wars 07/29/2020 Ratings

For the last two weeks, Dynamite's ratings have steadily improved while NXT's have declined. This created a larger and larger gap between the two shows' ratings with Dynamite emerging as the clear winner. This week, however, those ratings snapped back in the opposite direction. (See graph above.) Here are the details.

• Although Dynamite has been on a roll for the past two weeks with growing ratings, they took a big downturn this week. Its audience fell from 845,000 viewers last week to 773,000 viewers this week. That's a big decreaser of 8.5%. The show's 18-49 demographics rating fell by a slight smaller margin. It dropped from 0.32 last week to 0.30 this week.

• NXT saw the opposite happen as it experienced a big jump in the ratings. It jumped from 615,000 viewers last week to 707,000 viewers this week. That's a huge boost of 15.0%. NXT's 18-49 demographics rating rose as well. It went up from 0.17 last week to 0.18 this week.

Luckily for AEW, Dynamite had such a large lead in the ratings recently that this sudden shift in the ratings still allowed for the AEW show to come out ahead in the Wednesday Night Wars. However, NXT is now back within throwing distance of regaining the top spot with only 66,000 fewer viewers this week. This shows what a competitive situation the landscape has become. In fact, both brands have often included championship matches in their shows recently to try to get the upper hand. This seems like a far cry from when Paul Levesque (a.k.a. Triple H) called AEW a "piss-ant company".

As what has become the norm for Dynamite, AEW filled the show with some great tag team wrestling. This included a Tag Team Championship match pitting the team of Kenny Omega and Hangman Page against the Dark Order. Also, we saw a Tornado Tag Team match where the combination of World Champion Jon Moxley and Darby Allin battled against Brian Cage and Ricky Starks. But despite all of that, the attention grabber of the night had to be the TNT Championship match between Cody and Warhorse. Not only did independent wrestling star Warhorse get a national stage to showcase his talents, but we also saw the AEW debut of Matt Cardona (f.k.a Zack Ryder) during the post-match fallout. The ratings for next week's episode of Dynamite will be interesting because it will feature the actual in-ring debut of the former WWE performer.

Over on the USA network, we saw another Triple Threat match in the tournament to crown a new NXT Champion. This time, it was an exciting match between Finn Balor, Dexter Lumis, and Timothy Thatcher. Plus, we saw a tag team bout featuring NXT Womens Champion Io Shirai as she and Tegan Nox took on Dakota Kai and Candice LeRae. As for the NXT Champion, Keith Lee was confronted by Karrion Kross with an attempted attack on Lee by Cameron Grimes. This nicely furthered the Lee/Kross storyline from last week's match between Kross and Dominik Dijakovic.

The ratings for both Raw and Smackdown remained relatively steady this week. This is good news for WWE given that the ratings for the two shows have been regularly dropping on average.

• Raw's ratings fell very slightly this week. The size of the show's audience went down from 1,628,000 viewers last week to this week's 1,616,667 viewers. That's a small decrease of 0.7%. Although this percentage is relativaly insignificant, the drop does make this episode of Raw the second lowest rated one in history in terms of viewership. On the upside, the show's 18-49 demographics rating did go up. It improved from last week's 0.46 to this week's 0.48.

• Smackdown's ratings barely changed last week, and it is the same case this week. Its viewership grew just 0.6% as it went up from 1,912,000 viewers last week to 1,924,000 viewers this week. And for the third week in a row, Smackdown's 18-49 demographics rating stayed at 0.5. So for three weeks in a row, the show's ratings practically stayed the same.

This week's results puts Dynamite back on a winning streak. This is now the third week in a row where AEW has garnered a bigger audience that WWE on Wednesday nights. Dyanmite's win-loss record now stands at 34-8-1 for viewership and 42-1 for the 18-49 demographic. Conversely, NXT's record is now 8-34-1 for viewership and 1-42 for the 18-49 demographic.