Inside the Numbers: Best week for ‘Dynamite’ in months
This week’s AEW “Dynamite,” built around the Blood & Guts main event, did surprisingly well numbers-wise, with the show averaging 952,000 viewers, the biggest audience in four months.
As you might have expected, the actual Blood & Guts match, which started with ring intros beginning at 9:04 p.m. ET, four minutes into the 9-9:15 p.m. quarter-hour, eventually bled viewers as the match, which spanned the rest of the show, and went over into the first three minutes of the 10 p.m. ET hour, dragged on.
The viewer number for the night peaked in the 9:15-9:30 p.m. quarter-hour, according to data from Wrestlenomics, at 980,000 average viewers for that 15-minute span.
The next two quarter-hours dropped to 945,000 and 928,000, with the three-minute overrun averaging 980,000, which, being careful here, you may want to write off, on the chance that some of the new viewers for those three minutes were tuning in because they wanted to watch the next show, “The Cube.”
This week’s “Dynamite” held viewers throughout, opening in the 8-8:15 p.m. ET quarter-hour, for the Hook-Jack Perry FTW title match, at 952,000 viewers, peaking in the opening hour in the 8:30-8:45 p.m. ET quarter-hour, for the Adam Cole/MJF vs. Daniel Garcia/Sammy Guevara tag match, at 977,000 viewers.
These are good numbers all around.
What if they had a PPV, and no one was there to watch?
Tony Khan’s Ring of Honor experiment is about to hit a financial wall.
There is absolutely no reason to pay for tonight’s “Death Before Dishonor” pay-per-view (7 p.m. ET, WatchROH.com).
Mark Briscoe had been set for the main event to challenge ROH world champ Claudio Castagnoli, but Briscoe is out with a knee injury that will likely shelve him into 2024, so the main event is now Castagnoli defending against PAC.
Khan tried to build this with PAC walking out on Castagnoli and the rest of the Blackpool Combat Club in the main event of “Dynamite” on Wednesday, but … less than two days of build?
The bigger problem here is that Ring of Honor isn’t available on cable TV or even for free on YouTube. Khan’s decision to put the company behind a paywall didn’t make sense when he did it, and doesn’t make sense now that he has to see that ROH has no momentum.
It’s his money.
The rest of tonight’s card, which would make for a halfway-watchable “Rampage”:
- ROH Women’s World Championship: Athena (c) vs. Willow Nightingale
- ROH World Television Title Match: Samoa Joe (c) vs. Dalton Castle
- 4 Way Tag Team Match for the ROH World Tag Team Titles: The Lucha Brothers (Rey Fenix & Penta El Zero M) (c) vs. The Kingdom (Mike Bennett & Matt Taven) vs. Aussie Open (Mark Davis & Kyle Fletcher) vs. Best Friends (Trent Beretta & Chuck Taylor)
- ROH World Six-Man Tag Team Championship: Mogul Embassy (c) vs. Master Wato, Ryusuke Taguchi & Leon Ruffin
- ROH Pure Championship: Katsuyori Shibata (c) vs. Daniel Garcia
- 6 Man Tag Team Match: The Dark Order vs. The Righteous
- Gravity vs. Komander
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Chris Graham
