On a night where most were following coverage of the incoming U.S. president, AEW & NXT were up in viewership.
CNN and MSNBC’s coverage of the inauguration of President Joe Biden dominated Wednesday’s cable figure as the two properties occupied the top twenty-five cable slots. The top non-news program was MTV’s The Challenge, which featured the news that Lio Rush was leaving the show.
AEW Dynamite finished #33 on the cable charts but was third for non-news programming with 854,000 viewers and a 0.36 in the 18-49 demographic. Those figures represented a 10 percent increase in viewers and a 12.5 percent jump within the demo compared with last week’s numbers.
Excluding the Brodie Lee Tribute show, which was a unique show, it would be Dynamite’s best figure since December 10th, which was the week after Sting’s debut at Winter is Coming.
While most of its key demos increased, they did suffer a big loss with men 12-34 dropping by 26 percent and adults 18-34 decreased by 17 percent this week. Their largest gain was among women 18-49 improving by 15 percent.
In Canada, AEW did not finish among the top ten sports programs, meaning they had less than 72,600 viewers. It was a big night of sports in the country with both the Toronto Maple Leafs, Montreal Canadiens, and Toronto Raptors playing games. The Leafs vs. Oilers game was #1 among sports programs with 1,215,600 viewers.
NXT finished #67 on the cable charts and #19 among non-news programming with 659,000 viewers and a 0.15 rating in the 18-49 demographic. They also experienced an uptick from last week’s numbers with viewership up by 19.6 percent and the demo rating increased by 7 percent. Due to their charting outside of the top fifty cable programs, we don’t have additional demographic breakdowns for NXT.
