This week’s rating and viewership for Monday Night Raw can be seen as a positive or a negative depending on how you look at it. The problem is that there are a lot of ways to look at it.
The numbers for this week’s show, in and of themselves, don’t mean anything because Raw was airing opposite the most watched presidential debate in the history of television. We knew the show would not do well, and it ended up doing the second lowest rating (1.75; the record is 1.5) in the history of the show while pulling in what Dave Meltzer reported was the lowest average viewership (2.46 million) in the show’s history.
While Meltzer speculated that it could end up doing the lowest rating for Monday night wrestling on USA Network going back to the Prime Time Wrestling days, a cursory look at historical ratings information suggests that Prime Time most likely never went that low. The earliest number I could get, from July 1988 (which week wasn’t clear), was a 3. while when the show went off the air at the start of 1993 to make way for Raw, it was hovering in the low 2s. Suffice to say, based on how the cable universe shifted and the numbers we have, Prime Time dropping below a 1.5 seems unrealistic.
It was Wade Keller of PWTorch who probably made the most astute observation about Mondays rating:
Raw comes in at 1.75 rating, down from 1.97, a mere 9 percent drop in rating compared to a 30 percent drop for MNF up against debate.
— Wade Keller (@thewadekeller) September 27, 2016
However, there are two ways to look at this:
- WWE has an amazingly loyal audience, and that counts for a lot.
- WWE’s audience has eroded to consist only of hardcores who don’t pay attention to world news.
The latter is admittedly a little extreme, but you have to remember that WWE programming and pro wrestling in general gets exceedingly low rates for its commercial time. That problem is twofold: While a lot of it is steeped in negative stereotypes about pro wrestling fans being idiots who think it’s a real sport, past research into wrestling fans have given critics (and thrifty advertisers) some ammunition.
For example, in 1999, SummerSlam was mainstream thanks to Jesse Ventura’s involvement, so Gallup did some polling of wrestling fans. “Not surprisingly,” Gallup’s Mark Gillespie wrote, “wrestling fans tend to be young males with high school educations who earn less than $30,000 annually.” Not surprisingly, for an article from 1999, he didn’t exactly word that tastefully. Other takeaways included wrestling fans largely being Democrats, 33% of black men and women surveyed calling themselves fans compared to 16% of whites, and, surprisingly, the east coast having the least wrestling fans of any region in the United States.
A 2013 poll from Scarborough had similar results:  It showed the median household income of WWE fans as $35,229, well below the “average U.S. sports fan” median of $50,667 and even the UFC’s $47,238. On top of that, almost two thirds of WWE fans surveyed were high school graduates or less, Whatever you think of the data and whether you not you think it reflects you, these surveys were conducted by established pollsters that sponsors and potential corporate partners will listen to. The last thing WWE needs is more data the points in a similar direction, and it can definitely be argued that Monday’s rating does just that.
Of course, we know that WWE has tried to clean up their image over the years. Toning down the content helps, as does publicizing charity work and even the change in media perception of pro wrestling the last few years. Still, WWE programming is filtered through Vince McMahon’s aesthetic and we’re only a couple weeks removed from the last poop joke. The women wear so much makeup and have such ridiculous hair extensions that even without a “T&A”-heavy image, the company’s presentation of them is still questionable.
And even if all of that changed? Sponsors still have hard data that reinforces their most negative perceptions of wrestling fans.
I’m honestly not sure how WWE addresses this. But they have to try.
