Source: TNAStars.com and TV By the Numbers
The final viewership estimates for this week’s episode of iMPACT Wrestling on Spike TV are now available. Please note that exact cable ratings numbers will not be available for this week since, for the second week in a row, iMPACT Wrestling fell out of the top 50 cable programs last night. Like last week, the reason iMPACT Wrestling fell out of the top 50 cable programs for the night likely has to do with DirecTV dropping its coverage of Viacom channels. The numbers show that even without the aid of the DirecTV audience last night’s episode managed to bounce back from a multi-year low in viewership last week. This week’s episode of iMPACT Wrestling brought in about 1,316,000 viewers and we estimate that it scored a final cable rating of 1.03 * over the course of the show’s two hours. [Editor’s Note: The final cable rating for this episode was 0.91]
By comparison, this week’s episode had an estimated final cable rating that is 0.18 of a point higher and brought in approximately 208,000 more viewers than last week’s episode, which scored a final cable rating of 0.85 with an average audience of 1,108,000 viewers.
* We estimate the final cable rating based off of the following formula: Total Viewership for the six weeks where iMPACT Wrestling has been airing live at 8:00pm EST = 7,737,800 / 6 shows = an average of 1,229,667 viewers. Total Rating for the six weeks where iMPACT Wrestling has been airing live at 8:00pm EST = 5.8 / 6 shows = an average rating of 0.96. We divided the the average rating of 0.96 by the average viewership of 1,229,667 and multiplied the result by the confirmed viewership number for this week. The final result of that multiplication is the estimated cable rating for the week. We acknowledge that this method does not adequately account for the potential sustained jump in viewership that iMPACT Wrestling enjoyed the weeks before DirecTV pulled its Viacom channels.
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!
