Source: TNAStars.com
The final cable rating and viewership estimates for this week’s episode of iMPACT Wrestling on Spike TV are now available. The numbers show that this week’s episode wound up with one of those weird coincidences where the final ratings number received a nice bump from the previous week, but the total viewership was down just a little bit over the last seven days. This Thursday on cable television, iMPACT Wrestling faced extremely stiff competition against the NBA Finals (which brought in over 11 million viewers on ESPN). On the USA Network, an airing of NCIS nearly doubled the total viewership for this week’s episode of TNA programming. Meanwhile down on network television, the CBS show Big Bang Theory had more than six times the viewers of iMPACT Wrestling in the half hour period between 8:00pm and 8:30pm. On the other hand, the wrestling program trounced the total viewership for programming on The CW. This week’s episode of iMPACT Wrestling scored a final cable rating of 0.98 which represented about 1,252,000 viewers over the course of the show’s two hours.
By comparison, this week’s episode had a final cable rating that is 0.09 of a point higher, but brought in approximately 44,000 less viewers than last week’s episode, which scored a final cable rating of 0.89 with an average audience of 1,296,000 viewers.
The total viewership for any one episode of TNA’s iMPACT Wrestling is hard to estimate. On his Twitter account, Eric Bischoff suggests that DVR numbers can add a total of 10% to 12% to the final viewership numbers. Historically, we’ve seen DVR+1 and DVR+3 figures (the amount of people who watch the show on their DVR within one day and three days of recording it) add 200,000 more viewers to the final viewership number reported above. Plus, Spike.com uploads each full episode of iMPACT Wrestling to its website for free online streaming for a four month period. The online streaming versions of the show typically generate about 20,000 views before they are taken down (some episodes have many more viewers, others have less). Also, the TNA channel on YouTube posts a large portion of each episode online with seemingly no date noted as to when they will be removed. However, there is no way to know whether or not DVR or online viewers are part of the original viewership estimate, so these figures are rarely reported by professional wrestling websites. However, in the interest of providing a definition for the full spectrum of “viewers” for each episode we feel this information is still good to know!
Interested in learning more about how iMPACT Wrestling’s historical ratings and viewership numbers? If so, 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 from the spring of 2010 and iMPACT Wrestling vs. Superstars from all of 2010 and the first part of 2011. Also, you can see a comparison of iMPACT Wrestling’s viewership numbers from week-to-week in 2011 and the beginning of the ratings and viewership tracking information for 2012. Enjoy!
