WWE’s Friday Night Smackdown moved to MyNetworkTV stations on October 3. We no longer get Smackdown ratings for our overnight fast affiliate ratings posts, but we will still get them with our final weekly broadcast ratings, which include MyNetworkTV, on Tuesdays.
We’re going to experiment with posting the WWE ratings results for Friday Night Smackdown and WWE RAW together as long as there is interest.
Click here to see the past WWE ratings posts.
| PROGRAMS | NET | DAY | TIME | Persons Live+SD (000s) |
| WWE ENTERTAINMENT (WWE RAW) | USA | MONDAY | 9:00 PM | 4.586 |
| WWE ENTERTAINMENT (WWE RAW) | USA | MONDAY | 10:00 PM | 4.493 |
| FRIDAY NIGHT SMACKDOWN | MyNet | FRIDAY | 8:00 PM | 3,161 |
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Nielsen TV Ratings Data: ©2008 The Nielsen Company. All Rights Reserved.
Thanks for this info
Keep this going; looks like Smackdown lost a million or so viewers with the switch.
Scot, my TV spider sense says they pick much of that back up in the next couple weeks and that only a small loss is permanent.
Well this techinally means that for Friday The CW was sixth out of the six broadcasting networks, this is hilarious. The CW should have stuck with WWE on Fridays and tried to develop their Sunday-Thursday block instead of ditching WWE for Media Rights Capital. I bet they are kicking themselves now.
Josh, CW is very often sixth (Univision usually beats them for absolute audience size and often in the demos as well).
On Friday the CW was *seventh*.
Thanks for this info!
Once people figure out that they DO have MNTV things should go back to normal
Pretty nice number for Friday Night Smackdown actually. Same thing happened when they moved to Fridays. It may not see 100% recovery but I’m sure WWE will take it as they get to say they helped building another network.
Bill, thank you so much for posting this ratings comparison for WWE programming. I hope you continue to do it as much as you can.
I think that SD! has gotten off to a promising start especially since the viewership number was expected to be lower than 3 million viewers. Also a 1.0 in the demo was the first time that was ever accomplished for MNTV. Once people figure out that they do have MyNetworkTV and its on UPN’s old affiliates. MyNetworkTV is cleared in 96% of the country except some rural areas like CW. Everybody at least in the TOP 56 markets have MyNetworkTV. I even had to help a friend of mines out find the channel for him in another town. It was right there on channel 36. People just aren’t finding the station hard enough.
I expect around November, December, or January for the numbers to get back to the 4.5-5 million viewership levels. The only bad thing about the new SD deal is that some cities don’t air SD at 8pm on Fridays anymore and baseball pre-emptions are going to put a hurtin’ on their ratings starting in April.
Thanks for the post!
Thanks! smackdown rules!
please keep posting this info it is really helpfull!
Thamks for making a WWE Ratings post now I am not sure it will keep enough interest for you guys to continue doing it weekly but it’s got my interest that’s for sure and I just have to say The CW made a huge mistake getting rid of SmackDown I mean sure The CW most of the time still finished last on friday night’s but SmackDown was like the second highest rated show on the whole network I dunno but if i’m running a network I don’t cut ties with my second highest rated show but that’s just me LOL