What’s the story?
The latest episode of SmackDown Live saw a slight increase in viewership from last week’s episode. The May 23, 2017, edition of SmackDown averaged 2.328 million viewers which meant viewership increased by approximately 153,000.
In case you didn’t know...
This week’s episode of SmackDown Live was the fallout episode from the brand-exclusive pay-per-view Backlash which aired from the Allstate Arena in Rosemont, Illinois and was headlined by the WWE Championship match between Randy Orton and Jinder Mahal.
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The heart of the matter
SmackDown’s viewership has been on a decline following the Superstar Shake-up. The first post-Superstar Shakeup episode of SmackDown was the episode where Mahal became the number one contender and had a loss of 500,000 viewers. The viewership continued to decline and reached a year-low of 2.175 million viewers last week.
Though this week’s episode of SmackDown Live did result in a slight increase in viewers, the overall viewership is still one of the least viewed episodes of the year, thus far.
Also read: 5 possible challengers for Jinder Mahal’s WWE Championship
Impact
This increase in viewership could indicate that fans were more interested in Mahal as champion than they claimed to be on social media.
Viewership for WWE programming typically increases after a new world champion is crowned. A recent example, not including the post-Mania viewership, would be the January 31, 2017, episode which featured John Cena celebrating his 16th WWE Championship reign and resulted in a viewership increase of 260,000.
However, there is an example of viewership stalling after a major championship changes hands. An example of this would be the February 14, 2017, episode where Bray Wyatt made his first appearance as WWE Champion following the Elimination Chamber; resulting in a slight decrease in viewership by approximately 1,000 people.
Author’s take
Mahal’s championship reign is still in its infancy so how Mahal is perceived by fans is ultimately a result of SmackDown’s booking.
Whether fans like it or not, people are paying attention to the Maharaja’s championship reign, and we can only hope that the company does right by him for however long he holds the prestigious title.
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