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PWTorch editor Wade Keller presents a special Thursday Flagship edition of the Wade Keller Pro Wrestling Podcast featuring a WrestleMania 36 Preview with ex-WWE Creative Team member and professional stand-up comedian Matt McCarthy.
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(Search “wade keller” to subscribe in podcast app or CLICK HERE to subscribe in Apple Podcasts.)<\/p>\n
Last night’s episode of WWE Smackdown Live on USA Network drew a 1.86 rating among live and same-night-DVR viewership. That matches last week’s rating. Viewership was 2.607 million, up from 2.603 million last week (so a negligible increase of 4,000 viewers, within the margin of error).<\/p>\n
The rolling ten week average headed into this week was 1.74, so it’s above that, but Smackdown didn’t see the bump in rating that Raw experienced the night before.<\/p>\n
The 2017 average for Smackdown is now 1.76, above the 1.72 average for 2016 to this point. The ten week rolling average, though, is above last year’s ten-week rolling average through this week or 1.67 (it’s 1.75 counting this week’s rating).<\/p>\n
Keller’s Analysis: The difference between Raw’s 2.14 and Smackdown’s 1.86 isn’t great, but it says something about Smackdown as a “B-brand” that even with A.J. Styles wining the championship and an connective angle between \u00a0the two shows that there is still a gap of over 400,000 viewers, on average, that watch Raw and skip Smackdown (assuming the rest watch both, which of course isn’t true, but the percentage who watch just one show and not the other should, in theory, also be even enough that the 400,000 difference is relevant). If you compare Smackdown’s two hour average viewership of 2.6 million to Raw’s third hour viewership of 2.8 million, that gap is quite a bit smaller. Compared to the first hour viewership of Raw, though, there’s a much bigger difference (2.6 compared to 3.3 million).<\/em><\/p>\n