WWE RAW Viewership Down, Poor Third Hour This Week
WWE struggling to keep viewers interested in current programming.
WWE saw the viewership for RAW fall this week, coming in at 3.191 million viewers. By comparison, the show drew 3.238 million last week.
This was a low number going into this Sunday's PPV Extreme Rules, but what really stood out was the low third hour viewership that RAW drew.
The hourly breakdown for this week's RAW was as follows:
First Hour: 3.376 million viewers (3.345 million viewers last week)Second Hour: 3.302 million viewers (3.356 million viewers last week)Third Hour: 2.894 million viewers (3.013 million viewers last week)
There was definitely strong competition during Monday evening, as the NBA Playoff game between the Golden State Warriors and Oklahoma City Thunder drew a solid 8.706 million viewers. This number was up substantially from last year's NBA Western Conference Finals.
That said, RAW's third hour viewership has been going down for several months now, so it's hard to determine how much of an effect the basketball game had on RAW. We've seen other, more watched, sporting events have minimal effects on RAW's viewership over the last several months, including the BCS National Title Game and several NFL Monday Night Football games.
These football games often times had two or three times as many viewers as the NBA game did on Monday evening, and RAW usually didn't have an hour drop below three million viewers like this week's final hour of the broadcast did. In fact, only two shows in all of 2015 had hours below three million viewers. This was already the third time it has happened in 2016.
In the past, other sporting events usually had a profound impact on the RAW ratings. However, there is a thought process now that RAW's audience has dropped to a level where the majority of the audience watching are hardcores, so there aren't as many casual fans to draw away for other sports like there was in the past.
RAW ended up being the third most watched show on cable Monday evening, trailing both the NBA playoff game and its post-game show, Inside The NBA. In the 18-49 age group demographic, RAW finished the night in fourth place.