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Last night, AEW and NXT both had special editions of their weekly shows to kick 2021 off with a bang. AEW held New Year's Smash Night 1, and NXT delivered New Year's Evil. Unfortunately, due to the prevalence of news programming, both shows suffered a disappointing night in the Wednesday Night War. AEW lost more than 300,000 viewers.
According to Pro Wrestling Torch, this week's episode of AEW Dynamite saw a large decrease in their numbers. 662,000 viewers tuned into the show, and this rating is a sizable drop from the 977,000 viewers it had last week. Meanwhile, NXT's numbers climbed up to 641,000 viewers. (Last week, the show drew 586,000 people.)
One has to believe that neither company believed their numbers were going to be overly impressive this week. The controversial events that occurred on Wednesday made it easy to predict that many viewers would watch the news. As a result, this week's numbers should not be seen as an indictment on either company. Both NXT and AEW offered solid shows on Wednesday night.
The official ratings for both shows will be available later this week, but these numbers offer a somewhat clear picture. This report allows fans to see how both shows fared this week. Both NXT and AEW will hope to bounce back with better numbers next week.
WWE NXT's numbers rise, but they still fall short of AEW Dynamite
In the all-important 18-49 demographic, AEW once again came out on top. But this week's number dropped from 0.40 to 0.25. On the other hand, NXT's numbers climbed from 0.12 to 0.16. Though NXT managed to improve both its viewership and demographic numbers, it still couldn't beat AEW Dynamite this week.
As of this writing, it's unclear how either show placed in the top 50 shows on cable television on Wednesday night. This information will be released later this week.
