Wednesday Night Wars 01/22/2020 Ratings

The ratings for this week's edition of AEW's Dynamite and WWE's NXT are somewhat surprising. AEW was able to chalk up another one in the win column, but the fact that the show occurred on a cruise ship seemed to have had an adverse effect on their numbers.

Despite the latest edition on Dynamite being held on a cruise ship, it actually lost 69,000 viewers as their numbers fell from 940,000 last week to 871,000 this week. That's a significant drop of 7.3 percent. This is somewhat surprising given that the show has been seeing steady numbers recently. Inversely, the number of viewer rose significantly for NXT. The auduence grew from last week's 700,000 to 769,000 this week. That's a very healthy boost of 9.8 percent. So it seems that history is repeating itself. Back in November 2019, NXT's ratings got a very healthy bump right before WWE's Survivor Series pay-per-view. This drove down Dynamite's numbers somewhat. (See chart above.) And now, the same thing seems to be happening again with WWE's Royal Rumble occurring this weekend.

Dynamite's 18-48 demographic rating similarly fell this week, dropping from 0.38 to 0.35. This is not surprising since the number of viewers experienced a similar drop. Over on the NXT side, their big bump in the size of their audience translated to a bump in their 18-49 demographic as well. It went up from 0.21 to 0.24. This is a great sign for NXT since it shows the continued upswing in NXT's ability to capture that key demographic.

This week's Dynamite occurred on a cruise ship during Chris Jericho's Rock n' Wrestling Rager at Sea. (For those who don't know, Chris Jericho is part of the rock band Fozzy.) In addition to the unique venue, the card featured two highlights, a tag-team title match between SCU and Kenny Omega/Hangman Page and #1 contenders macth between Jon Moxley and PAC. The show started with the tag team title match, and we saw the first ever title change in AEW as Kenny Omega and Hangman Page scored the victory. Not only was the action fast paced as you would expect from these competitors, but it was great advancement of the Hangman Page storyline. Despite him now being a champion, we continue to see signs of friction between Page and the Elite. As the story progress, I can imagine even how this championship match was won will play a role. (Page pretty much won the match single handedly at the end.) As for the #1 contender's match, it was a vicious clash since the two competitors have the same intense persona. Given the storyline of Moxley turning down Jericho's offer to join the Inner Circle, it is no surprise that Moxley won and is now the #1 contender for Chris Jericho's championship.

On NXT, we saw two highlights as well. They were the semi-finals of the Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Classic and Keith Lee challenging Roderick Strong for the North American Championship. During previous rounds of the tag team tournament, we saw some of the best wrestling on television, and this latest round was no different. This week, we saw the Grizzled Young Veterans versus Bobby Fish/Kyle O'Reilly and the BroserWeights versus Marcel Barthel/Fabian Aichner. In the first match, the Grizzled Young Veterans got the pinfall after a distraction from Imperium. In the second match, the victory went to fan favorites Pete Dunne and Matt Riddle as the Broserweights. So next week, it will be the tournament finals pitting the Veterans against the Browerweights. For the main event of the show, Keith Lee is now your North American champion after a clean victory over Roderick Strong. This is the big man's first championship with the company. And with his immense popularity, it likely won't be his last.

So Dynamite was able to chalk up another victory this week, but it was by a much smaller margin this time. The AEW show's audience was only 13.3% larger than that of NXT's. Assuming this change in momentum is indeed due to the Royal Rumble, it will be interesting to see what happens next week after the pay-per-view this weekend. Who know? Maybe Vince MacMahon has something clever planned for the event to give the black and gold brand a decisive edge over AEW. (e.g., Maybe an NXT wrestler will win the Royal Rumble?) For the moment, though, the viewership win-loss record stands at 12-3-1 for Dynamite and 3-12-1 for NXT. The record for the coveted 18-49 demographic stands at 15-1 for Dynamite and 1-15 for NXT.