Well, I tried, folks. If you have been following XHeadlines.com for the last few months (good for you!), then you know that I have been trying to post the best, cleanest version of the ratings information that I could find for AEW, WWE, and Impact Wrestling. Once upon a time (like 10+ years ago), this was a bit of a chore because you had to dig through all of these deceptive headlines and clickbait just to get to the real data. Then some websites came around and started reporting just the data from Nielsen, which was a tremendous help.
The best of these websites was Mitch Metcalf’s ShowBuzzDaily. When that website went dark late last spring, it shutdown much of the ratings reporting for cable television, including all of the wrestling shows that we know and love. And then along came some other websites to fill this void in the market and some of them were good, if not slow in reporting ratings and viewership numbers. However, the best of the bunch has easily been Brandon Thurston and his reporting on Twitter and through his website. I am also an avid listener to his weekly podcast and among his various reporting threads, I do not think it is possible to get a better view of ratings and viewership than through Thurston’s reporting. And when you add in his informed commentary on his podcast, there is simply no one better than Thurston when it comes to reporting on the ratings and viewership numbers for professional wrestling.
And that is where the opening sentence of this column comes in. I tried, folks. I tried to report the ratings and viewership for shows like NXT and Impact Wrestling, but I could not bring myself to care enough about either thread to keep it up and thus you may have noticed that I stopped reporting that information a few weeks ago (and by “reporting” I mean taking the data that Thurston provides via Twitter and reformatting it into my own ratings and viewership template). I do not know if I will pick up on reporting the ratings and viewership for either of those shows again, but for the time being, the answer is no. I do plan to continue reporting on Dynamite and Rampage because, well, I like those shows and I find them entertaining.
However, I wrote this brief article to give props where they are due and that is to Brandon Thurston and his game-changing reporting of ratings and viewership for wrestling shows. I encourage all of you – especially my long-time readers – to check out his reporting and see how in-depth and precise he gets with his figures. If you want the best data possible along with the most well-informed commentary available when it comes to ratings and viewership, then Brandon Thurston is your source. And if you want a good, brief recap of those ratings and what they mean for our favorite wrestling shows, then I hope you continue to check those weekly reports out here at XHeadlines.com!
