I’ve gone back and forth on the importance of covering TV ratings for Monday Night Raw, Friday Night SmackDown and Impact Wrestling. Part of me knows it’s important to know where the shows and companies are in terms of viewers. Another part of me thinks we’re maybe a little too much inside baseball discussing numbers outside of any scope of perspective.
For example, what does it mean that WWE averaged about 4.5 million viewers on Monday Night Raw this week? Yeah, it means that WWE had the highest-rated cable show on Monday night, as it usually does, but … what else does it mean? Three times as many people watched The Voice on NBC, and twice as many watched How I Met Your Mother and The Bachelor.
Even judged against past metrics, viewership is down for Raw, which drew 6 million viewers a show in 2005, and then if look back to the Monday Night Wars era when Raw and WCW Monday Nitro went head-to-head, man, yeah, those were the days. The two shows combined audience many weeks was in the 10-plus Nielsen range. For comparison sake, the rating for Raw this week was, gulp, 1.5, and we’re supposed to be jumping up and down happy about that?
Of course, there’s a lot more competition for viewers today than there was in the mid-1990s or even the mid-2000s. The TV universe is so much bigger, and of course there’s much more available in terms of Internet options for viewing TV shows, movies and more.
So we’re going to continue covering TV numbers, but shifting to a weekly wrap of the numbers, and we’re going to try to provide the context of what the numbers mean more often. How did Raw do versus competition? How did Impact do relative to its lead-in? How does SmackDown do anything being stuck on SyFy?
If we do that like we aim to, we’ll provide a more complete picture of what the numbers mean.
– Column by Chris Graham
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