Source: Various
The final cable rating and viewership estimates for last night’s episode of iMPACT Wrestling on Spike TV are now available and it looks like the show suffered from a decline in viewership for the second week in a row, but the final cable rating was up from last week. iMPACT Wrestling’s flagship show had an increase in its final ratings number, but a slight decrease in overall viewership as compared to last week. This week’s episode of the show scored a final cable rating of 1.19 which represented about 1,578,000 viewers over the course of the show’s two hours. It is worth noting, though, that the total viewership is about 200,000 more than the number reported above after DVR views are counted (this is rarely reported, though).
This week’s final rating is 0.08 of a point higher (but approximately 31,000 less viewers) than last week’s episode, which scored a final cable rating of 1.11 with an average audience of 1,609,000 viewers. Sometimes there are these types of anomalies in the ratings where the rating itself goes up, but the total viewership goes down. That just means that less people, overall, were watching cable last night than the week before, but that a higher percentage of the people who were watching cable were watching iMPACT Wrestling as compared to the week before.
We also know a little bit about how last night’s show performed in terms of hour-by-hour ratings. The first hour of last night’s show scored a 1.09 rating while the second hour scored a 1.29 rating. In addition, the final segment of the show (where Sting defeated Mr. Anderson to win the TNA World Heavyweight Championship) scored a show-high 1.34 rating. Last night’s episode of iMPACT Wrestling on Spike TV had more viewers than prime time and late night programming on other cable channels like FX, TLC Comedy Central, Tru TV, the A&E Network, Cartoon Network, the History Channel, Bravo, Discovery, the Food Network, and HGTV.
If you’re interested in iMPACT Wrestling’s ratings performance for 2010 and 2011, then check out TNAStars.com’s Ratings War area. In the Ratings War area you can see a comparison of iMPACT Wrestling vs. Monday Night RAW and iMPACT Wrestling vs. Superstars from all of 2010 and 2011. Enjoy!
*Pulls hair out in a fit of Rage*
I hear ya, Radiitz. In truth, though, I’m not entirely concerned about the 31,000 drop in viewership. Those 31,000 viewers are probably regular fans who were out for the night or decided to DVR the episode instead of watching it live or something like that (at least that’s what I think).
What’s more concerning to me is that there hasn’t been a steady increase (with the occasional dip) in viewership in quite some time. From my perspective, the show has been getting better and better and yet the general audience isn’t following. Maybe it’s because wrestling isn’t as “cool” as it was during the attitude era, I don’t know.