It’s Bumps All Around for WWE After Royal Rumble: Here are Raw and Smackdown’s Ratings

It’s official folks: we are in the midst of Pay Per View Season. The time between Royal Rumble and Wrestlemania tend to bring in a lot of viewers for the company year after year.

It’s to be expected–we’re looking at the two most storied and famous Pay Per Views in professional wrestling, and the WWE always goes all out for the two. As such, the buildup for the two Pay Per Views on their weekly televised events tends to be larger than everything throughout the year.

So after the intense Royal Rumble last weekend, how did Raw and Smackdown do? Quite well, actually.

Raw pulled quite a massive ratings boost after Royal Rumble, going up from 3.29 million viewers to 3.61 viewers. Royal Rumble definitely got people hyped for WWE again, and pulled in an additional 320,000 viewers to see what happened in the aftermath.

Additionally, Smackdown also received a significant boost in ratings, going up to 2.81 million viewers from 2.56 million viewers the week before. While it is still lagging behind Raw in the ratings, the return of John Cena of WWE Champion has seemed to put the Smackdown brand on a much more equal footing. However, despite both bumps, Smackdown remains at 78% of the viewership as Raw, which definitely needs to change for the brand to continue the brand split that returned last year.