Wednesday Night Wars 04/15/2020 Ratings

As we've said previously, much of the wrestling audience has grown tired of empty arena shows, and this is reflected in the relatively low ratings for both shows. However, there is still that hardcore fanbase who are going to tune in regardless, and it is that hardcore fanbase that have kept both show's ratings practically the same as those from last week. (See graph above.) As such, NXT was able to score another victory in viewership this week in the Wednesday Night Wars.

Last week, NXT saw a nice bump in the ratings by showcasing a number of the matches that was scheduled for the cancelled NXT Takeover event. This week, the show tried to build on that with a segment on Adam Cole and Velveteen Dream, a Tag Team Championship match, and a promo by Charlotte Flair, who apparently is part of the NXT roster now. Although these efforts didn't attract any new viewers, they did allow NXT to maintain almost 100% of the audience it gained last week. The number of viewers only fell an insignificant 0.1% going from 693,000 viewers last week to 692,000 viewers this week. The show's 18-49 demographic rating, however, did take a turn for the worse. It fell from 0.19 last week to 0.17 this week. This continues to reenforce that fact that the WWE audience is largely made up of older fans who have probably been watching WWE for decades.

Over on Dynamite, there was a no holds barred championship match between Jon Moxley and Jake Hagar, but it wasn't enough to improve the show's ratings. In fact, the size of the audienced dropped slightly. The number fell from last week's 692,000 to this week's 683,000. That's a slight decrease of 1.3%. It is not too surprising that the championship match didn't get much attention. There simply wasn't enough build up to the match. This is not AEW's fault of course. There is only so much any promotion can do with empty arena shows and performers being unavailable due to health/travel restrictions. Incidentally, this is why Dynamite has featured numerous independent wrestlers on recent shows. Much of the regular roster was simply unavailable when these episodes were taped. And obviously, the lack of star power played a role in the recent low ratings as well. On the bright side, Dynamite's rating among the 18-49 demographic continues to hold strong compared to NXT's. Like with the general viewership, it only fell slightly going from 0.26 last week to 0.25 this week.

This is NXT's second ratings victory in a row, something that hasn't happened since last year. So momentum definitely seems to be on WWE's side. However (and this is a BIG however), WWE has received tremendous backlash since laying off a large number of wrestlers and staff on Wednesday, with many fans threatening to boycott their products. So that might serve as a wildcard in lowering NXT's ratings next week. We'll have to wait till next week to see if there is indeed any kind of fallout. As it stands, NXT's win-loss record in the Wednesday Night Wars is 5-22-1 for viewership and 1-27 for the 18-49 demographic. This makes Dynamite's record 22-5-1 for viewership and 27-1 for the 18-49 demographic.