What’s the story?
Ratings for this week’s episode of Monday Night Raw are down following what many fans are considering a poor go-home show heading into Fastlane this Sunday.
The show featured appearances by Goldberg, Triple H, and Seth Rollins, but the show only managed to average 3.093 million viewers. Hour 1 averaged 3.127 million viewers, hour 2 would increase by more than 100,000 viewers for 3.233 million, and hour saw a decrease of about 315,000 viewers for an average of 2.98 million.
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Since the year began, Monday Night Raw has managed to average at least three million viewers per episode with the exception of the 1/9/17 edition of Monday Night Raw, which averaged 2.9 million viewers and featured a main event of Chris Jericho and Kevin Owens defeating Roman Reigns in a handicap match for the United States Championship.
The highest viewership for Raw since 2017 began has been the fallout show of the Royal Rumble. The post-Rumble Raw averaged 3.6 million views and featured a non-title match between Sami Zayn and Chris Jericho, an impromptu Universal Championship match between Kevin Owens and Braun Strowman, and ended with the debut of Samoa Joe.
The heart of the matter
WWE asked fans on Twitter if they enjoyed the show via a poll and the results showed that 52% of the fans didn’t enjoy the show while 48% of fans did.
This clearly indicates that fans did not enjoy the show, which many fans say had nothing to offer aside from the opening segment, the Cesaro-Joe match, and the closing segment.
What’s next?
Next week’s episode will hail from Chicago, Illinois and will be the fallout show for the last pay-per-view of the year until WrestleMania 33 on April 2nd.
There are several championship matches that many fans have predicted to result in new Champions being crowned as well as a likely appearance by The Undertaker, so the viewership will likely bounce back following next week’s Raw.
Sportskeeda’s take
This edition of Monday Night Raw seemed to have little effort put into it as the WWE bombarded the crowd with uninteresting matches and more emasculating Stephanie McMahon promos. After about 30 minutes and 2 commercial breaks, Raw’s first wrestling match was The New Day taking on Rusev and Jinder Mahal; not exactly an intriguing matchup.
The WWE has stated multiple times that it believes ratings don’t matter so it’s likely that the promotion won’t try any harder to get more fans to tune in next week either.
Regardless of this, the fact remains that it’s likely that Goldberg and Charlotte Flair will be new Champions by next week and with the Chicago crowd being in attendance for Raw, the WWE probably won’t have to worry about fans tuning in.
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