“Monday Night Raw” Viewership Reaches Lowest Point in Months

The third showing of “Monday Night Raw” on the road to the “Hell in a Cell” pay-per-view occurred on Oct. 6, 2014. The show featured a surprise appearance by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, in addition to two matches being made official for the 2014 showing of “Hell in a Cell.” Despite all that, and other special guest appearances, viewership for “Raw” was noticeably down from last week.

According to TVByTheNumbers.com, the Oct. 6 showing of “Raw” averaged 3.797 million viewers. This number is down about six percent from the previous week’s viewership of 4.04 million. In fact, at just under 3.8 million viewers, it is the least watched episode of “Monday Night Raw” since at least July of this year. No episode in August or September had viewership under 3.8 million.

Below are the hourly breakdowns, showing no hour reached 4 million viewers:

Hour 1: 3.577 million

Hour 2:  3.891 million

Hour 3: 3.924 million

A positive note for WWE is that viewership increased throughout the night. Though, the return of The Rock did not bring in a huge bump in viewership. In the past weeks, the third hour tended to receive a sharp decrease in viewership from past hours, so just a slight bump is ambiguous. As expected, ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” beat out WWE, leaving “Raw” as the second most-viewed cable television program that night.

Editor’s Note

Even as viewership continues to dwindle, I doubt it will ever significantly fall off to cause a change in what has been a terrible fall product.