Viewership numbers and ratings have always played a huge part in professional wrestling. During the “Monday Night Wars” in the late 1990s WWE and WCW fought tooth and nail to secure the largest number of viewers. The fight was won by Vince McMahon when WCW went out of business in 2001, but almost twenty years later All Elite Wrestling launched and began to give the sports entertainment giant a run for its money.
In the early days, the buzz and interest surrounding the new wrestling promotion saw Dynamite regularly hit the 1 million viewers mark. The “Wednesday Night Wars” between Tony Khan’s promotion and NXT saw the latter on the losing end of viewership numbers and eventually move to another night. This gave some fans the belief that Khan could one day beat Monday Night Raw in the weekly ratings.
However, due to a multitude of factors including a pandemic, Vince McMahon’s initial, short-lived, departure and the appointment of Triple H as the head of WWE creative, the company has gone from strength to strength in popularity, success in and out of the ring and high viewership numbers.
Meanwhile, AEW is experiencing a poor run of viewership ratings as of late with its flagship show Dynamite drawing on average 900,000 views.
Is WWE To Blame For AEW’s Ratings Decline?
According to noted wrestling journalist Dave Meltzer, the resurgence of the World Wrestling Entertainment under Triple H is reportedly a ‘key reason’ behind Dynamite’s recent global ratings decline. Writing in this morning’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter, Meltzer would state:
Historically whenever WWE gets hot, its opposition goes down and WWE getting hot is likely a key part of the decline in AEW’s ratings all over the world. In 18-49 in the U.S., Raw has been up 19 weeks in a row from the same show one year earlier, Smackdown has been up 21 weeks in a row and NXT has been up 22 of the last 26 weeks. On the flip side, Dynamite has been down from the year before 26 straight weeks, and Rampage has been down 24 of the last 26 weeks
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