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What’s the story?
This week’s episode of Monday Night RAW was the go-home Show for SummerSlam and saw a slight decrease in overall viewership.
The August 14, 2017, edition of Raw averaged 3.233 million viewers; down 7,000 viewers from last week’s show.
In case you didn’t know...
Hour 1 of Raw kicked off with Dean Ambrose and Seth Rollins brawling with Cesaro & Sheamus and saw Sasha Banks face Nia Jax in a No. 1 Contender’s Match for the Raw Women’s Championship.
Hour 2 featured a Cruiserweight Championship match between Neville and Akira Tozawa as well as Finn Balor taking on Bray Wyatt in singles competition.
Hour 3 of Raw finished with the explosive encounter between Roman Reigns, Braun Strowman, Samoa Joe, and Brock Lesnar.
The heart of the matter
The following is the hourly breakdown for this week’s episode of Raw:
Hour 1: 3.419 Million
Hour 2: 3.293 Million
Hour 3: 2.988 Million
Hour 1 of this week’s Raw was up 156,000 from last week’s first hour, but the show saw massive decreases as the program progressed.
Hour 2 of Raw saw approximately 126,000 viewers stop watching, but the biggest drop came in hour 3 when 305,000 viewers didn’t stick around to see the confrontation between the challengers and the Universal Champion.
What’s next?
The viewership for WWE programming tends to fluctuate the most after pay-per-views, but there is typically increase in views the day after the show.
The decrease in viewership also represents a small portion of overall lost viewers, so the WWE could easily consider this week’s show a success.
Author’s take
The consensus amongst fans has been that Monday Night Raw was doing a good job of building up SummerSlam matches.
Viewership did decrease this week, but the overall difference in viewership between this week’s Raw and the episode on August 8, 2017, is nothing for anyone to be concerned about.
Besides, next week is the Raw after SummerSlam, so viewership is almost guaranteed to increase quite a bit.
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