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What's the story?
After last week’s horrendous viewership, Monday Night Raw managed to get their numbers up against significant competition from MLB.
The Raw after Extreme Rules averaged 2.866 million viewers - up nearly 400,000 from the Extreme Rules Go-Home show last week.
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In case you didn't know...
The show kicked off with Kurt Angle announcing two triple threat matches where the winners would face each other for the right to fight Brock Lesnar at SummerSlam.
Roman Reigns won the first match defeating Finn Bálor and Drew McIntyre while Bobby Lashley defeated Elias and Seth Rollins to win the second match.
The heart of the matter
Raw usually holds consecutive spots in the ratings but was beaten by the Home Run Derby, Love & Hip-Hop: Atlanta and Celebrity Softball at various points during the night.
The following numbers are from the July 16 edition of Raw (H/T: Showbuzzdaily):
Hour one: 3.118 million
Hour two: 2.859 million
Hour three: 2.622 million
The opening segment and match focusing on the next Universal Championship contender and the intrigue of Lesnar returning to TV was more than likely responsible for boosting Raw’s first hour numbers.
Raw lost more viewers than last week’s show but held a much larger audience for the majority of the program.
The numbers below are from the Raw before Extreme Rules on July 10:
Hour one: 2.582 million
Hour two: 2.508 million
Hour three: 2.320 million
What's next?
Two matches already announced for next week's show are The B-Team defending the Raw Tag Team Championships against Bray Wyatt and "Woken" Matt Hardy and Reigns vs. Lashley.
The numbers are more likely to decline, but the massive increase from this week’s program could make it possible for Raw to reach an average of three million viewers - a number that they haven’t reached in three months.
Did you enjoy the Raw after Extreme Rules? Tell us in the comments below!
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