Posted on 9/08/125 by Colin Vassallo
Raw will be facing an uphill battle over the next five
months as football season is back and Monday Night Football
on ESPN returns tonight.
Historically, Raw always takes a big hit in viewership
starting in September as more fans opt to watch NFL live
rather than WWE. WWE will be testing a new start time for
Raw from next week for three weeks in a row, starting an
hour earlier at 7PM ET.
Last year, Raw drew 1,430,000 viewers head-to-head with the
first MNF broadcast on ESPN on September 9. That was a
225,000-viewer drop from the previous week. In 2023 it was
even worse with Raw drawing 1,353,000 viewers in its first
broadcast against MNF, down 351,000 viewers from the prior
week.
With Netflix viewership, “ratings” will be calculated
differently as the way Netflix counts viewers is different
from the way Nielsen calculates them for cable and network,
so it will be impossible to compare the drop this year
compared to previous years.
Raw has been in the top 10 global Netflix charts weekly
since it started on January 6 and it could be that the
return of Monday Night Football ends that streak.