Raw on 12/29 fell to one of its lowest numbers of the last 17 years with 3.47 million viewers, a number that could have been far worse, given the ratings pattern. What makes this number worse than it sounds is that there was little of note on television in competition. It was the first Monday without NFL football, and the ESPN college football coverage against Raw, which did 5.76 million viewers, was less than half of what a typical Monday NFL game would do.
But there is good news in the ratings, and that is the ratings pattern. It clearly tells two lessons. The first is that promoting something on social media in the hours before a broadcast means nothing. The second is that Daniel Bryan has far more interest than the company believed.
WWE pushed all day that Bryan would be making an announcement, teasing it to be a retirement. Even with that, and no strong football competition (the early game going against the first hour did significantly lower ratings than the late game at 9 p.m.), Raw did 3.17 million viewers in hour one. That may have been the lowest non-holiday first hour since 1997. But the show’s numbers grew, the exact opposite of its recent pattern. I don’t buy for a second that it could be a Roman Reigns vs. Seth Rollins match that did that, or a Cutting Edge Peep Show segment with Rollins. Brock Lesnar was put on early, did an angle, and while there was a hint of him coming out in the final segment, it wasn’t pushed. The return of The Authority that closed the show was something that nobody would have known was happening, and didn’t happen until the last minute, so wouldn’t have made a difference in the ratings. It couldn’t have been Edge & Christian, given that they were the only ones advertised hard all week for the show, and that led to the worst hour one in recent memory.
The only thing that could have grown the audience was the tease, after the show started, that Bryan would make an announcement, and that it would be his retirement.
The show grew to 3.48 million viewers in hour two, which is still pretty bad. Hour three was up to 3.73 million viewers, which included the Bryan interview. Even so, Bryan’s interest was not close to the curiosity in November garnered for Sting’s return at Survivor Series, when the first hour did 4.73 viewers against the NFL, before falling to just above normal levels in the second hour, when most people figured out Sting wasn’t going to appear.
