Wednesday Night Wars 04/22/2020 Ratings

The results for this week were a little surprising. Given the continuously falling ratings for AEW Dynamite in recent weeks, there was no reason to think that this week would be any different. After all, even though last week's episode of Dynamite included a championship match between Jon Moxley and Jake Hagar, the show's ratings continued to slide. So the fact that AEW's ratings were able to bounce back this week was unexpected. And with this comeback, Dynamite was able to stop NXT's winning streak in the Wednesday Night Wars at two. (See graph above.)

Although this episode of Dynamite didn't feature any championship matches, it did progress the tournament for the TNT Title. And to spice things up, Dustin Rhodes announced that he would retire if he didn't win his qualifying match. Realistically, I doubt that any fans seriously thought he would lose, but perhaps it was this angle which helped improve the show's ratings this week. The audience grew 7.0% from last week's 683,000 viewers to this week's 731,000 viewers. In terms of the 18-49 demographics rating, it actually fell slightly this week despite its audience growing. It dropped from 0.26 last week to 0.25 this week.

As for NXT, the most interesting portion of this week's episode was probably the Drake Maverick match in the tournament for an interim cruiserweight champion. As many wrestling fans know, Drake Maverick was released from WWE last week, and he posted a very heart breaking video describing his situation when this occurred. However, after that video, a subsequent post from Maverick asking fans to tune in as well as what occurred during his match on the show raised some eyebrows. Basically, there were multiple indications that all of this regarding Drake Maverick was just another WWE storyline. It is hard to imagine that WWE would turn a Coronavirus-related layoff into a storyline since this is what is actually happenning to millions of people right now. However, the fact that WWE is playing up Maverick's situation on the air definitely seems odd. Well, regardless of whether Maverick's situation is real or not, it didn't help the show's ratings. In fact, the audience size fell, going from 692,000 last week to 665,000 this week. That's a drop of 3.9%. This isn't a huge drop, but it's definitely noticeable. For the 18-49 demographics rating, it went up slightly from 0.17 last week to 0.18 this week.

So what caused the shift in momentum between the two shows? It's hard to say for sure, but it is interesting to note exactly who the additional new viewers for Dynamite were this week. Despite the audience growing by 50,000 viewers, the show's 18-49 demographics rating actually fell. This means that a large portion of that 50,000 viewers are older than 50. And who usually has an older audience like that? The WWE of course. So NXT's drop in the ratings, Dynamite's bump in the ratings, and the older demographic of Dynamite's newly acquired viewers all seem to suggest that a large portion of the NXT audience simply decided to watch the AEW show instead this week. If this is indeed the case, could this be related to the WWE firings last week? Are fans lashing out against WWE by watching the competition instead? It's definitely possible, especially if WWE is rubbing salt into the wound by utilizing Maverick's situation as a storyline.

With this situation regarding Drake Maverick, no one even knows what to believe any more, but perhaps that is WWE's strategy all along. Maybe by blurring the lines between reality and fiction, WWE believes more interest will be generated for the brand. Who knows? It might work. We'll have to see next week's ratings to find out. Until then, Dynamite's win-loss record for the Wednesday Night Wars is 23-5-1 for viewership and 28-1 for the 18-49 demigrhic. Conversely, NXT's win-loss record now stands at 5-23-1 for viewership and 1-28 for the 18-49 demographic.