After seven straight weeks of being beaten, at times by something of a landslide, we’ve finally seen the first ratings victory for WWE NXT this week. Admittedly it does have a few caveats, but a win is a win on the record books. They had to fight for it for sure, but they’re on the board now.
In total viewership, the number for this past saw 916,000 for NXT and 893,000 for AEW. This is quite the bump for NXT, who saw 750k last week, compared to AEW’s 957k.
AEW as usual did win every demo except for the demo WWE always does best in, the Over 50 crowd. While it’s always their advantage demographic, that was much higher than usual this week, as they scored a 0.40 in it, signifying how much of the US’ populace in that demo was watching that night.
This number speaks more eloquently on some facts that were already fairly well established by deeper dives in recent weeks. Namely, atleast for now, there’s a lot less crossover between these two shows than you’d expect. The flipping back and forth doesn’t seem to be happening too much in the Wednesday Night Wars. While NXT undoubtedly took a chunk of AEW’s audience tonight, them rising by 166k whilst AEW drops by 60k shows there’s largely two seperate audiences at play, atleast as far as TV viewing is concerned.
The other is the effect that an advertised main roster invasion had on the show.
This past Monday, Raw closed with a promo from Triple H announcing an open invitation on NXT for anyone from Raw or SmackDown to come and pick a fight. This after the OC invaded two weeks ago, and Bayley made her presence known as well, both in unadvertised capacities.
While the shock factor is somewhat needed for an effective invasion, anyone could’ve told you that the total viewership would’ve been higher if this was announced in advance. Moreover, I have to think this number could’ve been a lot higher if a similar promo was cut shortly after the initial takeover of SmackDown which kicked this angle off. That was a great show and a pretty surreal thing to witness. The angle was hot for all of a night, and if they had followed up by advertising a counterstrike on that Monday’s Raw, they would’ve almost definitely won that week without even giving much away. Even if it was still just the OC acting alone and the show itself was exactly the same, it likely would’ve worked out just fine.
They let the invasion angle cool over the past few weeks, as NXT hasn’t looked remotely like the same threat ever since. So even though they went all in this week and did get a bump out of it, they could’ve definitely gotten more out of it. And then of course there’s the worry of the precedent set by them getting this only with the main roster’s help, and what message it might send Vince McMahon going forward.
Still, they got that first win and there’s no reason to complain.
And while it’s true this is likely a temporary bump that will drop off after Survivor Series, something that separates it from the big spikes that special episodes of Raw and SmackDown might get, is that NXT is putting on really good, highly acclaimed shows. So in theory they should be able to retain some of that viewership everytime they get a spike like this.
It’ll be an interesting thing to see next week, as AEW is coming with a bigger card in many ways, whilst NXT shows us the fallout of WarGames and Survivor Series. Hopefully, the black and gold brand does alright for itself in the three-way battles for brand supremacy. They really can’t afford to be buried right now.
