The third week of AEW Rampage saw the show finish #1 among all cable programming coming off the giant debut of CM Punk the week prior.
Friday’s episode was the first taped edition of the show, which occurred two nights earlier at the UWM Panther Arena in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The show finished #1 on cable for Friday with 722,000 viewers and 434,000 (0.34) in the 18-49 demographic, per Brandon Thurston of Wrestlenomics and Showbuzz Daily.
It beat out the NFL pre-season game between the Minnesota Vikings and Kansas City Chiefs that averaged 1,164,000 viewers and 0.31 in the 18-49 demo airing on the NFL Network.
SmackDown and Rampage both registered 0.34 among adults 18-49 but to underscore the difference between that rating for a network program and a cable one, SmackDown had 330,000 more viewers in the demo due to the large numbers of homes with Fox compared to TNT.
While it was obviously going to be a comedown from the week prior with CM Punk’s debut, the show did beat Week 1 of Rampage in the demo, which did 740,000 viewers and 396,000 in 18-49.
Compared to “The First Dance”, this week’s show fell 36 percent in viewers and 37 percent in 18-49. Because of the anomaly of “The First Dance”, the better comparison is the debut episode and this week’s episode was down 2.4 percent in viewers and increased by 9.6 percent in the key demo from the August 13th debut.
The show was hurt in adults 18-34 with 101,000 viewers for this past Friday’s episode, which is down from an average of 153,000 in Week 1 and 231,000 in Week 2 for “The First Dance”.
Compared to Week 1 on August 13th, this week’s episode saw an increase in adults 18-49, Males 18-49, and adults 25-54. Among women 18-49, it was almost identical with 125,000 in Week 1 and 123,000 in Week 3.
This past Friday’s edition of Rampage streamed on TSN Direct and we don’t have viewership figures for the show in Canada.
