At the beginning of October, a brand new professional wrestling war broke out when All Elite Wrestling started facing off directly with WWE . NXT officially began its run in mid-September and has done well in the ratings, but AEW started beating it immediately when Dynamite started in October. Now, the roles have reversed and AEW is not only losing the ratings war, but they’re also seeing their audience drop drastically.
One month ago, NXT truly began closing the gap on AEW in the ratings war, but All Elite continued to stay ahead. Last week, WWE’s third brand finally surged ahead and beat Dynamite in the ratings which caused a lot of fans to sit up and take notice.
The ratings for last week took a while to come out due to the Thanksgiving holiday.
Wrestling Inc. reported that Dynamite on TNT drew in 663,000 viewers which is the lowest amount of viewers it has had ever. AEW launched its weekly TV show on October 4, and their previous low viewership was 789,000 which was for the show on the day before Halloween.
NXT ended up with a really great viewership of 810,000 viewers for its weekly showing on the USA Network. The show was headlined by Finn Balor taking on Tommaso Ciampa in the first yellow brand television episode since Survivor Series .
That @KennyOmegamanX … WOW ? pic.twitter.com/9svEaVzLIi
— AEW on TV (@AEWonTV) December 2, 2019
Last week’s NXT also had a Cruiserweight Title Match, the NXT Tag Team Championship on the line, and a handful of other great matches. WWE has to be happy with the way the ratings have stayed consistent for NXT and also vastly gone up in the last month.
As for Dynamite , AEW has to be a slight bit concerned as their numbers have fluctuated at times, but the low numbers are just not good. AEW started out with 1.409 million viewers for its debut episode in early October, and they stayed over the million mark for the first three weeks.
After that, they had really good ratings but just saw a massive drop this week. On November 20, Dynamite drew in 893,000 viewers which means that the low number for Thanksgiving week was a full 26 percent drop from the previous number.
Both wrestling shows had some big competition with the holiday specials such as A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and the Lakers vs. Pelicans game. It’s not always easy to determine how things will go during a holiday week, but AEW has to notice that NXT not only beat them in the ratings but dominated them. Fans will be keeping a very close eye on how things go with this week’s episodes.
