WWE SmackDown Viewership Falls This Week
How many viewers tuned in for Thursday's show?
WWE's SmackDown television show continues to be a mixed bag for WWE.
The broadcast usually ranks near the top five in cable television viewership every Thursday night, but SmackDown consistently pulls in a far smaller audience than RAW (despite airing on the same channel). That trend continued this week.
SmackDown saw its viewership drop slightly this week in comparison to the previous week's show. The May 12 edition of SmackDown drew an audience of 2.26 million viewers. The May 5 broadcast came in with a final audience of 2.35 million.
Some of the drop could probably be attributed to the NBA Playoff game on ESPN. The highly anticipated game between the San Antonio Spurs and Oklahoma City Thunder easily won the title for most cable viewers on Thursday, drawing in an audience of 5.23 million viewers.
SmackDown this week featured a very good main event involving Sami Zayn, Kevin Owens, The Miz, and Cesaro in a tag team match. The show, however, lacked the in-ring presence of the two participants in next Sunday's Extreme Rules PPV main event (Roman Reigns and AJ Styles). Styles was held out of participating in the show due to a slight ankle injury suffered on RAW, but as WhatCulture reported on Friday, that injury is not expected to keep him out of action moving forward.
SmackDown finished with a 0.67 cable rating among adults ages 18-49, which was also down from last week's show which drew a 0.71 in that demographic.