WWE Raw Suffers Viewership Drop

By Ryan Droste / February 18, 2016

Following a slight bump in the television viewership department last week, this week's WWE RAW ratings came in with some bad news. The show lost 250,000 viewers as compared with last week's show which featured Daniel Bryan's retirement from wrestling. The February 15 edition of RAW averaged 3.477 million viewers. The hourly breakdown this week was as follows:

First Hour: 3.661 million viewers Second Hour: 3.537 million viewers Third Hour: 3.233 million viewers

The general trend of viewers tuning out throughout the show continued this week, with the third hour bottoming out in viewership as has been the trend for several weeks now. In most eras of wrestling, including just a couple of years ago in WWE, this kind of trend of such a large percentage of viewers tuning out from the beginning of the show to the main event would have seemed unimaginable. Instead, WWE seems to have accepted the trend, as the third hour of the show this week was uninspired and featured a main event (Braun Strowman vs. Big Show) that had very little appeal to viewers. In other words, WWE did very little to keep viewers tuned in for the final hour of the show. RAW finished as the most watched show on cable television Monday evening, but it fell far below Monday's top rated show on all of television, the Grammy Awards, which drew 24.951 million viewers. It's very likely that the Grammy's large viewership took some of RAW's typical viewers this week. RAW finished as the top rated show on cable in the 18-49 demographic, with the third hour of the show drawing the biggest rating in that demo with a 1.26. When the broadcast channels are factored in, though, again the Grammys ran away with the night, drawing a 7.7 rating in the 18-49 demographic.