Wednesday Night Wars 06/17/2020 Ratings

For the past two weeks, both Dynamite and NXT have seen their ratings slip. (See graph above.) But this week, both shows were able to make a comeback in the ratings with both seeing increases of more than 10% in their viewership. As is usually the case with such jumps in the ratings, though, Dyanmite's jump was slightly higher than that of NXT's. (Simiarly, whenever there is a notable drop in the ratings, Dynamite usually sees a bigger drop than NXT.) So Dynamite was able to score another victory in the ratings this week over NXT. Here are the details.

• Dynamite's viewership made the biggest bounce-back out of the four major wrestling shows on television by increasing 14.0%. It grew from 677,000 viewers last week to 772,000 viewers this week. The AEW show's 18-49 demographics rating also saw a significant jump as it went up from 0.23 last week to 0.28 this week.

• NXT also saw a significant bump in its ratings. Its number of viewers went up from 673,000 last week to 746,000 this week. This was a very healthy increase of 10.8%. Correspondingly, this episode of the black and gold brand saw an increase in its 18-49 demographics rating as it went up from 0.16 last week to 0.20 this week.

To capture the audience's attention this week, both Dynamite and NXT shined a spotlight on their tag team division this week. AEW presented two major tag team matches, a championship title match between Kenny Omega/Hangman Page and the Natural Nightmares as well as a number one contender's match between Best Friends and Le Sex Gods. Also, we saw the AEW debut of former NWA Television Champion Ricky Starks as he battled Cody for the TNT Championship. Over on NXT, WWE presented us with two Tag Team Champship matches. Bayley and Sasha Banks faced off against Tegan Nox and Shotzi Blackheart for the women's titles while Imperium put the the men's titles on the line against Breezango. In addition, NXT picked up where they left off last week with the storyline between Adam Cole and Karrion Kross which will obviously lead to a championship match.

Last week, Dynamite won the Wednesday Night Wars by a VERY thin margin of onluy 4,000 viewers. With this week's increase in ratings, though, Dynamite was able to pull ahead slighty with 26,000 more viewers than NXT. But mathematically, that is only a margin of 3.5%, so the two shows are still practically running neck and neck. In fact, that has been the case for the last three weeks. So this may be a sign that NXT may be gaining ground overall on AEW. As we mentioned last week, though, AEW has Fyter Fest coming up. So we will see if the newer promotion can widen its gap again then.

Over on Monday and Friday nights, Raw achieved its highest rating in over two months, and Smackdown was able to garner over two million viewers after falling below that threshold last week.

• The size of Raw's audience jumped 11.6% going from 1,737,333 viewers last week to 1,938,667 viewers this week. That is the biggest audience the show has had since April 6th when it scored over two million viewers. Unfortunately for WWE, Raw still hasn't been able to reach that milestone since then. However, this week's numbers suggest that it may be within the show's grasp again. Strangely, despite the jump in the audience size, Raw's 18-49 demographics rating remained the same as last week's at 0.53.

• Smackdown was able to make up a lot of the groud it lost last week. Its audience grew from 1,984,000 viewers last week to 2,065,000 viewers this week. This a bump of 4.1%. Like Raw, however, Smackdown's 18-29 demographics also remained the same as last week's at 0.5.

With this week's victory, Dynamite has once again extended its winning streak making it 9 weeks in a row. Its win-loss record is now 31-5-1 for viewership and 36-1 for the 18-49 demographic. Inversely, NXT's record is now 5-31-1 for viewership and 1-36 for the 18-49 demographic.