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What’s the story?
This week’s episode of Monday Night Raw stayed under three million viewers throughout the show and was down big from last week's show in September.
The Oct. 2nd, 2017 edition of Raw averaged 2.773 million viewers; down 150,000 from last week.
In case you didn’t know...
The first hour kicked off with Braun Strowman taking on Seth Rollins and later saw Elias facing Titus O’Neil.
The second hour saw Nia Jax fight Mickie James and the Intercontinental Championship match between Roman Reigns and The Miz.
The final hour of Raw had a tag team match between Sasha Banks and Bayley against Alicia Fox and Emma and ended with Enzo Amore addressing the Cruiserweight Division.
The heart of the matter
Raw went up against the Monday Night Football game between the Washington Redskins and the Kansas City Chiefs that began 30 minutes into Raw’s broadcast. The game between the Redskins and the Chiefs averaged 11.944 million viewers and dominated cable TV for the night.
The following is the hourly viewership for this week’s Raw.
Hour One: 2.945 million
Hour Two: 2.756 million
Hour Three: 2.619 million
Raw suffered the biggest drop in viewership heading into the second hour with approximately 189,000 fans tuning out during the program. The third hour of the show had a slightly smaller decline of 137,000 viewers
Not only did this episode average the lowest viewership for Raw since June, but it was also down 24,000 viewers from the Oct. 3, 2016, edition of Raw which averaged 2.797 million viewers.
What’s next?
The WWE has been teasing a Shield reunion for weeks and next week’s Raw could be the show where Dean Ambrose, Seth Rollins, and Roman Reigns come together.
The decision to reunite The Shield is considered by many to be an attempt at boosting ratings, but that doesn’t seem to be working as Raw has remained under 3 million views since just before the return of Monday Night Football.
Author’s take
Many fans have considered 2017 to be a bad year for the WWE and the viewership decline is one argument that adds credence to that claim.
Hopefully, the company can turn things around before their viewership suffers even more.
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