Since debuting in 1993, WWE's Monday Night RAW has been the flagship show of the promotion and for most of that time period, all of professional wrestling. For the majority of that time, with the exception of five years in the early 2000s, the show has aired on the USA Network. That will change in January 2025 when RAW moves to Netflix worldwide and as the show enters into its last 3 months on cable television in the US, it's one of the hotter shows on television.
At a time when the NFL is doing near record ratings with the last two Monday Night Football games (airing head-to-head with RAW) being among the highest viewed games on ESPN in years, RAW is the only nationally televised cable wrestling show to be consistently up in ratings year-over-year.
This past Monday, RAW averaged 1.509 million viewers and a 0.49 rating in the all important 18-49 demo. That was better than anything else on television with the exception of the NFL on the night. It was up 13.3% from the same week in 2023 in overall viewers and 11.4% in the 18-49 rating. That marked the fifth week out of the last six that they've had a year-over-year increase in viewership and the sixth week of the last seven they've been up year-over-year in the demo. Going back further, they've been up year-over-year in 18-49 for 24 of the last 32 weeks. This is a stretch the company hasn't seen since the lead up to WrestleMania in 2023 when the Rock returned as a regular character.
This also bucks the trend of cable television as a whole, which is declining in available homes at a rate of about 10% per year with viewership for most shows declining at a rate even sharper than that. None of the other five cable TV shows from WWE or AEW have been up year-over-year in even consecutive weeks since NXT was in July while the AEW programming of Dynamite, Collision and Rampage have been down 20% or more when compared to the previous year's level and that has been going on for well over two years.
When examining the reasons why this is the case for RAW and RAW alone, there is no obvious reason. Most weeks the shows are sold out so the characters are obvious clicking with the ticket buying public. When examining the quarter hours, the main drivers appear to be the ongoing storylines with Rhea Ripley and Damian Priest teaming up against the Judgment Day as well as the Drew McIntyre vs CM Punk feud that has been a big part of the show for most of the year. Underneath that, the Wyatt Sicks have been a ratings success for the few matches they've had and Gunther has had good early returns in championship reign.
The show will move to two hours starting in October, which will continue until the show moves to Netflix in January. At that point, there will be no set length but it's expected to be closer to three than two hours. It is likely that we will see viewership numbers for the show at that time but they will be a worldwide as opposed to a US number and won't be an accurate reflection. In the meantime, Smackdown has moved back to the USA Network and will be that station's top rated show for at least the next five year unless something drastically changes.
