The final edition of WWE Raw heading into WrestleMania didn’t click with the audience with one of the lowest numbers in the history of the program.
Monday’s go-home show fell below two million viewers with 1,924,000 watching the three-hour show on the USA Network and down 4% from last week. It’s a new low for the year, falling beneath last week’s figure.
The only shows to do lower included the taped December 23rd show last year and the episode that aired on Christmas Eve in 2018. This week’s show was watched by fewer people than the episode on New Year’s Eve 2018 that averaged 1,968,000 viewers.
This week also set another mark with the lowest third hour Raw has ever had since it expanded to three hours in 2012 with 1,646,000 viewers.
The first hour started with 2,139,000, so it wasn’t a show with much interest from the start and then fell to 1,986,009 in the second hour and 1,646,000 in the last hour. The first to third drop was 23%.
While the show received strong reviews due to the great series of interviews that build WrestleMania, the trend has been established that after the one-week novelty of the empty arena shows, the audience is turned off by them. Whether it’s the empty environment or the reliance on old footage, these shows are not seen as important even though WWE is one of the few entertainment outlets producing new content when people, in theory, have more free time due to staying at home more.
To compare, the first empty arena Raw on March 16th averaged 2,335,000 viewers featuring the replay of the men’s Royal Rumble from this year.
In the 18-49 demo, this week’s Raw did a 0.58, which was down 5% and fell 19% from the first hour to the third.
The biggest week-to-week decline was among males 12-34 down 20% from last week while the others were either small decreases or small increases except for females 12-34, which increased 15% from last week. That same demo also grew 11% from the first hour to the third and was their best category for the evening.
From hour one to hour three, adults over 50 fell 25%, males 18-49 fell 21.5%, and males 25-54 declined 19%.
Last year’s WrestleMania go-home show on April 1, 2019, averaged 2,639,000 viewers and was down 27% this year in viewership.
