WWE Raw Suffers Big Drop In Viewers This Week

This week's Raw viewership numbers are in and it's not great news for WWE. The show averaged 3.39 million viewers, which is down from the 3.89 million viewers last week. The first hour did 3.57 million viewers, the second hour was at 3.56 million viewers and the third hour dipped to 3.02 million viewers. These numbers are for the United States courtesy of Showbuzzdaily. The show earned a 2.44 rating. It's the lowest rating since a 2.31 on New Year's Eve 2012. Part of the reason it was down is because it was the Labor Day holiday in the United States. A year ago on Labor Day it earned a 2.81 rating. It was also down because of a huge college football game on ESPN with Ohio State beating Virginia Tech in a game watched by 17 million people. A week ago WWE had their highest ratings since June 15 with 3.89, but it was back down this week. It's probably going to hover around the low 3 million range for most of the next four months because this Monday is the debut of NFL Monday Night Football. They will likely get between 15-20 million viewers every Monday night. The third hour ratings drop is significant just because it means that over 500,000 million viewers turned off the show after the first two hours. That's partly because WWE did a poor job of setting up big matches. The main event match was a six man tag that was obviously a win by the babyface and then Sting dumping Seth Rollins' statue into a garage truck. It's not exactly riveting television. As is always the case with ratings and viewership numbers, the average fan probably doesn't care too much, but it does matter to WWE as well as their advertisers. Less eyeballs on the product hurts the company's bottom line.