SmackDown Live Ratings and Audience – April 17, 2018

One more big show. This week’s episode of SmackDown Live was yet another big episode after a long string of them. That was the case this time around again with the second half of the Superstar Shakeup. In other words, it was time to meet the new cast of characters for the new season after everyone left to go to Monday Night Raw the previous night. That’s something that happens annually now but the question is how interesting will it be? There’s only so much interest in getting rid of a bunch of stars, but was there an interest in bringing in some new people?

Miss this week’s show? Here are some quick highlights:

Top 10 SmackDown LIVE moments: WWE Top 10, April 17, 2018

According to 411mania.com, this week’s episode of SmackDown Live drew a .98 demographic rating and 2.796 million viewers. These numbers are even with and down 5% from last week’s .98 demographic rating and 2.952 million viewers. The viewership is still strongly above the viewership of the go home show from WrestleMania 34. As mentioned, last night’s show was focused on the second half of the Superstar Shakeup with a main event of Daniel Bryan/AJ Styles vs. Rusev/Aiden English.

If you didn’t see the show, here are the full results.

Opinion: These numbers aren’t half bad with the rating being the same being a rather positive sign. The main takeaway here is that the fans are sticking around for a less important show than the post WrestleMania episode. They also saw all of the new characters, but the question now becomes how many people stick around after the new cast was revealed. It’s great that they got people to see who was coming in, but now they need to get those same people (and more) to be around next week for the first actual week of them being the regular stars.

What did you think of this week’s show? How high can the viewership go? Let us know in the comments below.

Thomas Hall has been a wrestling fan for over thirty years and has seen over 50,000 wrestling matches. He has also been a wrestling reviewer since 2009 with over 5,000 full shows covered. You can find his work at kbwrestlingreviews.com, or check out his Amazon author page with 26 wrestling books. His latest book is the WWE Grab Bag.

Get the latest and greatest in professional wrestling news by signing up for our daily email newsletter. Just look below for “GET EXCLUSIVE UPDATES” to sign up. We are proud to offer our popular Wrestling Rumors app and encourage you to download it for an optimized user experience. It is available for Android and also on iOS. Thank you for reading!