Wednesday Night Wars 04/29/2020 Ratings

Even though both AEW and WWE have done their creative best to counteract the lack of a live audience, the wrestling audience just continues to dwindle. Smackdown saw its lowest rating since moving to FOX, and Raw had its lowest rating for a non-holiday episode ever. And although Dynamite and NXT put on strong episodes this week, the ratings for both shows fell as well. (See graph above.) The drop for Dynamite was slightly larger than that of NXT's, but the AEW show was still able to edge out another victory in this week's edition of the Wednesday Night Wars.

AEW presented a great episode of Dynamite this week highlighted by the semi-finals of the TNT Title Tournament. Namely, Cody Rhodes faced off against Darby Allin while Lance Archer did battle with Dustin Rhodes. There was also an exciting no holds barred match between the Best Friends and Kip Sabian/Jimmy Havoc. However, all this great wrestling still couldn't overcome the megative impact of an empty arena as Dynamite's ratings fell by 5.2% this week. The size of the audience dropped from last week's 731,000 viewers to this week's 693,000 viewers. In the 18-49 demographics department, the rating actually went up from 0.25 last week to 0.27 this week despite the smaller audience. That's great news for AEW and TNT since that number is what draws in the advertising dollars.

Not to be outdone, NXT included a trio of great matches. Charlotte Flair took on Mia Kim, Drake Maverick continued to "fight for his livelihood" in the interim Cruiserweight Championship tournament, and Damian Priest challenged Keith Lee for the North American Championship. It is still unclear as to whether the situation with Drake Maverick is part of a storyline. But whether it is or not, it definitely brought some attention to NXT, something the show desperately needs given that it is usually trumped by Dynamite in the ratings. Similar to Dynamite, though, none of these featured matches was enough to raise the show's ratings. The viewsership fell from 665,000 last week to 637,000 this week. That's a drop of 4.2%. This drop is actually smaller than that of its head-to-head competitor, but it was large enough to put the WWE show behind AEW's yet again. As far as the 18-49 demographics goes, the show's rating went down from 0.18 last week to 0.16 this week. This is not surprising given WWE's track record with attracting older audiences.

Both shows' ratings should theoretically improve next week since both WWE and AEW have already announced stellar cards for their upcoming episodes. But in this age of empty arena shows, nothing is for certain. AEW has been airing pre-taped shows for the past few week with limited performers. But next week, Dynamite will be returning to its live format with the in-ring debut of Matt Hardy in a "street fight" match with partner Kenny Omega against Chris Jericho and Sammy Guevara. In addition, World Champion Jon Moxley will be returning to action along with MJF. On the NXT side, we will see the return of Finn Balor in addition to two World Championship matches. Charlotte Flair will face Io Sharai, and Adam Cole will be defending his title against Velveteen Dream. Hopefully, these big-name matches will be able to bring back some of the wrestling audience and stop the general downward trend of wrestling shows.

With this April 29 installment of the Wednesday Night Wars in the books, Dynamite's win-loss record is now 24-5-1 for viewership and 29-1 for the 18-49 demigrhic. As for NXT, its win-loss record is now 5-24-1 for viewership and 1-29 for the 18-49 demographic. AEW has now won the last two weeks in a row, so they have momentum on their side. We'll see next week if they can extend their streak to three.