Since the debut of AEW Dynamite on TNT, there has been rampant talking about the head to head numbers and who is dominating who. Well, I decided to take a different approach here and look at the total number of viewers that are watching both AEW and NXT on Wednesday nights.
The reason for doing this is that we are in a wrestling revolution with a new competitor, that if done right, could legitimately go head to head with WWE at some point. Granted, that point is not right now, but possibly down the road. Here are the total numbers since the debut of AEW Dynamite:
10/2 – 2.3 million
10/9 – 1.93 million
10/16 – 1.726 million
10/23 – 1.661 million
10/30 – 1.369 million
11/6 – 1.635 million
11/13 – 1.707 million
11/20 – 1.809 million
11/27 – 1.473 million
12/4 – 1.696 million
12/11 – 1.556 million
12/18 – 1.478 million
12/25 – 831k (NXT Only)
1/1 – 1.515 million (NXT Awards)
1/8 – 1.668 million
Those numbers give us an average of 1.624 million viewers every Wednesday night enjoying some sort of wrestling program. So how does this compare to both Raw and Smackdown? Over the same timeframe, they have averaged the following:
Smackdown: 2.475 million
Raw: 2.209 million
So what does this all mean? Of course Wednesday night isn’t drawing as strongly, but the drop off is about 600k, which is honestly not terrible due to one of the shows being new. But those numbers also don’t factor in the fans that stream NXT on the WWE Network the following day. But those numbers don’t really play into this because in order to do a true comparison, we need to base it off live numbers. This also shows that there is pretty steady viewership across all 3 nights of the main programming.
When all is said and done, it’s safe to say that viewership for Wednesday night is in a pretty good spot right now. It will be interesting to see if there is growth or decline, especially as we get into the Wrestlemania season where all promotions bring their A+ game.
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