WWE's July Ratings Comparisons!

When it comes to the monthly ratings comparisons, July this year showed declines across the board.

Raw in July of last year averaged a 3.35 rating and 4.91 million viewers. It should be noted that includes the Raw 1,000th show and the entire month of the show had tremendous momentum because of it. If you take that show out of the mix, you still get a 3.22 average and 4.63 million viewers. 

For 2013 in July, Raw averaged a 2.97 rating and 4.00 million viewers. So the overall rating was down 11.6% and overall viewership declined 18.5%. Throwing out the Raw 1000th show and you get a 7.8% decline in ratings and a 13.6% decline in viewership. The viewership declines at a greater level than the ratings declines comes from two factors. The first is fewer homes get cable as compared to a year ago, and since ratings are a percentage of the homes that get the channel, that decline better measures the loss of popularity as compared to the viewership number. The other, which is actually more significant since homes lost is only about 2% and the audience numbers for every show were down far more than that, is the viewers per home watching wrestling has declined greatly over the past year. This has been a consistent trend all year. 

Smackdown last July averaged a 1.87 rating and 2.72 million viewers. But that’s misleading because one of the episodes aired on a Tuesday. If you throw that week out, the Friday night in the same time slot average was a 1.92 rating and 2.78 million viewers. This year the number was a 1.79 rating and 2.41 million viewers, or a normalized 6.8% decline in ratings and a 13.3% decline in viewership.