This Week's WWE Raw Audience Drops - SmackDown Live Audience Hits Record Low Against State Of The Union Address
Not the best week for WWE in terms of ratings...
Feb 7, 2019
With WWE WrestleMania 35 season now in full swing after the 2019 Royal Rumble, we're entering what is arguably the best time of the year to be a WWE fan.
Despite this, and despite a huge showdown promoted ahead of time between Stephanie McMahon and women's Royal Rumble winner, Becky Lynch, WWE Raw saw its audience drop this week.
The show averaged 1.51 million viewers, which will be disappointing to those behind the scenes who will have been expecting a better result given the fact there wasn't a major sporting event to go up against. For context, last year's corresponding episode did roughly three million average views.
The appearance of Lynch, surprisingly, didn't get the show off to the best of starts ratings wise - and even after her time on camera was done, there wasn't much of a drop off either.
Here are the hourly viewership stats for Raw:
- Hour one -- 2.656 million viewers
- Hour two -- 2.552 million viewers
- Hour three -- 2.321 million viewers
As for this week's SmackDown, it drew the show's lowest audience total since the July 2016 brand split, averaging 1.841 million viewers. (The previous low of 1.921 million happened on election night 2016.)
SmackDown was going up against President Trump's State of the Union address - which just so happened to be one of the longest speeches of its kind. The first 90 minutes of SD Live went up against Trump and clearly suffered because of it.