WWE RAW Hits Lowest Rating In 18 Years!

The bad news keeps coming for WWE and their television ratings. Monday's edition of RAW, which was loaded up with legends and top stars and optimism of a ratings turnaround, still managed to tie the lowest rating the show has drawn in the last 18 years. After several weeks of disappointing ratings, WWE brought out the big guns for RAW this week. "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, Ric Flair, Shawn Michaels, Brock Lesnar, and The Undertaker all appeared on the show, more star power than RAW has had all year. However, the company didn't even promote Austin on RAW itself until just hours before the show, so his appearance had very little impact on the ratings, as did the other Hall of Famers (some of which, unlike Austin, were promoted in advance). For the show to perform this poorly, despite this kind of star power, shows that interest in the product is truly bottoming out and the show is in need of a drastic shake-up.

The final cable broadcast rating for the show was a 2.21. The only other show to draw that low of a rating since 1997 was a Christmas Eve edition of RAW back in 2012, so not exactly a comparable situation. The cable broadcast rating figure is actually a percentage; it measures the amount of people who were watching television on Monday evening, with access to the USA Network, who tuned into the show. Last week's show drew a 2.33 broadcast rating. The overall viewership of the show this week was actually up slightly, averaging 3.356 million viewers compared to 3.284 million viewers last week. The fact that the cable broadcast ratings figure was lower this week than last, despite the show averaging more viewers, means that more people were watching television this Monday night compared to last week and a lower percentage of them tuned into RAW. RAW also continued a startling trend of losing it's audience in significant number as the show went on. The first hour of the show averaged 3.600 million viewers, the second hour averaged 3.347 million viewers, and the third hour averaged 3.123 million viewers.