AEW's New Strategy To Combat Declining Ratings Revealed
Can All Elite Wrestling reverse the negative ratings trend?
AEW Dynamite has been on a creative roll since debuting, with each new episode seemingly drawing increasingly levels of critical acclaim, but this hasn't been reflected in the ratings.
The show has fallen from a bumper 1.409 million for its 2 October debut to 963,000 on 23 October, though some drop-off was to be expected as Dynamite's new toy appeal started to wear off.
Per Dave Meltzer in this week's Wrestling Observer Newsletter, the promotion will now be looking at the way they handle squash matches in order to stop the ratings decline, noting that the 16 October episode of Dynamite saw a 5% dip in viewership when Santana and Ortiz showed up to make quick work of John Silver and Alex Reynolds coming off a commercial break.
Meltzer writes that AEW now plan on holding squashes end the end of a televised segment rather than the beginning, hoping that this will ease the problem.
An interesting point as one of the handful of criticisms that could be thrown at Dynamite so far is that they haven't done enough squashes, though Ortiz and Santana's 5% dip may put AEW off.