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What's the story?
We are just three weeks into WWE's new Mixed Match Challenge that takes place on a weekly basis on Facebook Watch. It seems that despite using the biggest stars that they have at their disposal, the ratings haven't been what the company expected.
In case you didn't know...
The Mixed Match Challenge began back on January 16th and has run for the past three weeks seeing the likes of Sasha Banks and Finn Balor, The Miz and Asuka and Alexa Bliss and Braun Strowman come out on top on their respective bouts.
The aim of the show was to put together couples who could then go on to become the first ever Champions as well as to test the water with WWE fans when it came to Facebook Watch and the reach that it has, especially since Facebook is rumored to be one of the companies interested in WWE's media rights, if they don't decide to re-sign with the USA Network in the coming months.
The heart of the matter
According to Dave Meltzer in the latest edition of The Wrestling Observer Newsletter, it seems that WWE officials have already soured on the Mixed Match Challenge and are reportedly "very unhappy" with the decline in viewership since the show began back in January.
It seems that the show reached its peak on the debut episode when it brought in 132.600 viewers to see Banks and Balor take on Shinsuke Nakamura and Natalya, this was then down to 92,000 as The Miz and Asuka took on Big E and Carmella. This past week the decline was even steeper as just 62, 400 viewers turned in to watch Bliss and Strowman defeat Becky Lynch and Sami Zayn.
Whilst live viewership is seemingly down, the shows themselves have evened out when it comes to total views since the past three weeks, every episode has averaged around 1.7 million overall views since their upload date.
What's next?
It is unknown what this means for the future of the competition when it comes to the end of its current run, but this Tuesday will see Goldust and Mandy Rose take on Jimmy Uso and Naomi, so it seems that the competition will continue despite the lack of live viewers.
Author's take
Facebook Watch isn't something that many fans are familiar with, which could be the reason why the views are coming in from The Network afterwards and not from the live stream. Perhaps next time the company should choose to live stream it on their own Network instead since it seems that this experiment hasn't exactly worked out well for them.
