10 Things You Learn From Rewatching LAST Time WWE Raw Lost In Ratings War
1. The Insane Numbers Difference
Having now finished taking a trip down memory lane, there's no way to say that this was a bad episode of Raw. Far from it, in fact. This was a fun, engaging, brisk revisit of a show that is somehow now 22 years old.
Not just was this a good episode of Raw, it's an episode that still managed to pull in a decent rating despite being beaten out by WCW Nitro on this occasion. While Nitro won out with a 5.1 rating, Raw still managed to hit a 4.5 rating itself. A little bit of digging and some quick (likely questionable) maths suggest that this defeated Raw was viewed in approximately 4.3 million homes - and let's face it, what WWE would do to achieve even half that number right now.
This past Monday night, the three-hour broadcast of Raw averaged 1.527 million viewers - the lowest number in Raw history! Not only is that a third of the viewers that the October 26, 1998 episode did, the scary thing is how October '98 was nowhere near the peak of WWE's viewing figures. Skip ahead a year, and it was just seen as 'the norm' for Raw to be pulling in viewers in the 5 million range and beyond.
To think, WWE did a 4.5 rating on October 26, 1998 and was bested by rival promotion WCW. Here in 2020, barely 1.5 million recently tuned in for a go-home show that ran unopposed by any wrestling rival.