Wednesday Night Wars 08/05/2020 Ratings

The ratings for Wednesday Night wrestling took an interesting turn this week. Both Dynamite and NXT saw a significant improvement in their ratings. This hasn't really happened since the middle of June. (See graph above.) Here are the details.

• Dynamite's ratings took a significant downturn last week. This is not necessarily surprising since the show has been seeing continuous rising ratings prior to that, so a drop to even out the average may seem natural. Well, if anything, this week's ratings would suggest that it was actually last week's drop that was the outlier. That's because the AEW show's numbers bounced back dramatically this week. Its viewership shot up from 773,000 last week to 901,000 this week. That's a giant leap of 16.6%. The show's 18-49 demographics rating also went up dramatically. It jumped from 0.3 last week to 0.36 this week.

• NXT's increase wasn't as dramatic, but it was still very healthy. The size of its audience went up from 707,000 viewers last week to 753,000 viewers this week. That's a very notable increase of 6.5%. The show's 18-49 demographics rating went up as well, as it grew from 0.18 last week to 0.2 this week.

Dynamite's huge jump in the ratings have once again allowed AEW to add another check to its win column. But as previously mentioned, the bigger story here is that the ratings for both shows significantly improved. For some reason, at least in terms of ratings, Dynamite and NXT seem much more immune to the effects of empty arena shows than Raw and Smackdown. In fact, Dynamite was able to surpass 900,000 viewers this week, a milestone which the show hasn't achieved since before the pandemic. So once audiences can attend wrestling shows again, it is easy to picture that the ratings for both Wednesday night shows will skyrocket. Many have speculated that Wednesday's will become the big night for television wrestling ever since the Wednesday Night Wars started. Well, with the current direction of AEW and WWE's television ratings, we might very well be heading in that direction.

Why did AEW see such a big jump in the ratings this week? No one can say for sure of course, but the show did have some great matches in addition to entertaining segemnts. There was the in-ring debut of Matt Cardona, formely known as Zack Ryder. We also saw a huge tag team match where the team of Kenny Omega, Hangman Page, the Young Bucks, and FTR took on the Dark Order. In addition, Jon Moxley defended his World Championship against Darby Allin. Heck, we even saw the return of Eric Bishoff to TNT television, something we haven't seen in twenty years.

NXT also had a jam packed card this week. Rhea Riplay faced off against Dakota Kai to determine the #1 contender for the NXT Women's Title. There was another triple threat qualifying match for the North American Championship. NXT Champion Keith Lee battled Cameron Grimes. Tag champs Marcel Barthel and Fabian Aichner defended their title against Undisputed Era. And as if all of that wasn't enough, we saw NFL Pro Bowler Pat McAfee knock out Adam Cole to end the show.

As for the ratings for WWE's other wrestling shows, Smackdown's numbers continue to remain flat while Raw did make a comeback from its terrible ratings last week.

• As those who watched the show know, Raw tried quite a few new tactics this week. This was probably in response to the show's record low ratings recently. (The size of last week's Raw audience was the second lowest in the show's long history.) And fortunately for WWE, they seemed to have worked. Raw's viewership increased from 1,616,667 last week to 1,714,667 this week. That's a decent boost of 6.1%. As for the show's 18-49 demographics rating, it also went up, going from last week's 0.48 to this week's 0.51. The question now is whether the new changes to the show will bring the audience back for more.

• Unlike Raw, Smackdown's ratings have been pretty steady during the last few weeks, and this week was no exception. Although if you want to get technical, there was a small drop of 1.6% in the show's vewership compared to last week. It fell from 1,924,000 viewers last week to 1,894,000 viewers this week. In terms of the 18-49 demographics rating, this marks the fourth week where Smackdown's rating have remained the same at 0.5.

Even though both shows deserve congratulations for their improve ratings this week, there still has to be a winner in the Wednesday Night Wars. And this week, it was Dynamite as their win-loss record improves to 35-8-1 for viewership and 43-1 for the 18-49 demographic. Unfortunately for WWE, this in turn makes NXT's record 8-35-1 for viewership and 1-43 for the 18-49 demographic. With this week's victory, AEW is now back on the hot streak with four wins in a row.