Raw ratings plummet against Olympics coverage

As it turned out, Raw got killed last night by the Olympics.

The show did 2.90 million viewers, which, with the exception of holiday shows, broke the 19-year record low of 2.95 million viewers set on November 23, 2015.

There was no doubt the Olympics were the culprit, doing 28.86 million viewers on NBC, with secondary coverage on NBC Sports Network doing another 1.56 million viewers. Raw was not hurt nearly as bad in 2012 by the Olympics. The only real difference, since overall Olympic numbers are down.

Four years ago on the first Monday of the Olympics, Raw did 4.50 million viewers and the Olympics did 31.58 million viewers. The big difference is the Olympics draws heavily with women, and with WWE losing so much of the male audience and women not dropping at nearly as high a level, a strong women’s appealing show hurt a lot worse now than four years ago.

The show dropped 12 percent from last week. However, Raw was the most watched show on cable beating The O’Reilly Factor that did 2.66 million viewers. It also beat several prime time show including beating ABC’s The Mistresses in the third hour and FOX’s So You Think You Can Dance head-to-head.

It was a pretty hardcore audience with minimal movement throughout the show, so there was no pattern of people tuning out any more than usual. The real difference in this week’s show opened with 2.95 million viewers and last week’s show opened with 3.46 million viewers.

The three hours were:

8 p.m. 2.95 million viewers
9 p.m. 2.97 million viewers
10 p.m. 2.81 million viewers