What’s the story?
Ratings for Monday Night Raw have been a point of interest for the WWE and fans alike since the mid-nineties. While the ratings for the show are nowhere near the level that they were during the Attitude Era, they have always been an interesting topic to follow. Based on a report from Wrestling Inc , ratings for the flagship program of the WWE increased slightly this week.
In case you didn’t know...
Last week’s episode of Monday Night Raw drew 3.216 million viewers on average during the course of the three-hour broadcast. That number was a huge increase over the previous week’s episode, which drew 3.093 million viewers.
The heart of the matter
This past Monday’s episode of Raw drew an average of 3.232 million viewers. The slight increase in ratings came off of an episode that featured an appearance from Brock Lesnar, as well as an advertised tag team match for the Number One Contendership to the Raw Tag Team Titles featuring Enzo Amore and Big Cass taking on the team of Sheamus and Cesaro.
That number shows a 0.5% increase in total viewers based off of last week’s number of 3.216 million. Based on the hour-by-hour breakdown, the first hour drew 3.176 million viewers. The second hour of the show drew 3.323 million viewers, and the final hour drew 3.197 million viewers.
The important thing to pay attention to based on those numbers is the number of viewers in the first hour as opposed to the number of viewers in the final hour. Usually, Raw loses a lot of viewers from the first hour of the show to the last hour.
Based on a previous article that can be found here, Raw has been dealing with a worrisome trend when it comes to declining ratings from hour one of Raw to hour three. However, this week saw an increase in ratings between the opening and closing hours. Granted, that increase was only .6%, but it’s an incredible increase when you consider the average decrease of 8.2%.
What’s next?
We will have to see how the ratings for Monday Night Raw look next week to see if these types of numbers can possibly be sustained.
Author’s Take
It can’t be overstated how huge it is that the third-hour number increased over the first hour’s number. It also must be considered that this past Monday was the start of Spring Break vacation for a lot of school systems in the United States. Needless to say, next week’s ratings for Raw are going to be very interesting.
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