WWE News: Raw Ratings Drop Slightly, but Does It Really Matter?

Monday Night Raw came to us from Chicago this week—a city that rarely disappoints when it comes to professional wrestling events.

The show successfully built on a number of budding WrestleMania storylines, most notably those involving the disintegration of the Shield and Daniel Bryan’s ongoing battle against The Authority and its growing malfeasance.

And despite not being overwhelmed by the episode myself, the general consensus amongst fans was one of positivity and enthusiasm.

But would such sentiments be reflected in Monday Night Raw’s viewership this week? WrestlingINC.com reports:

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Last night's episode of WWE RAW from Chicago was the most-watched show on cable for the night, doing a 1.6 adults 18-49 rating, even with last week.

This week's show averaged 4.576 million viewers, down just a bit from last week's 4.661 million viewers with Hulk Hogan's return. The first hour drew 4.672 million viewers, the second hour drew 4.620 million viewers and the third hour drew 4.438 million viewers.

"

Looking at the wider picture, such figures appear to be just fine. The fact that Raw was the “most-watched show on cable for the night” will be particularly encouraging to the WWE brass.

However, it’s also important to draw a more focused comparison with the competition. And given the company’s monopolistic position, there’s only one source of competition for the WWE:

Themselves.

As the source mentioned, this week’s show was indeed slightly down on last week’s average of 4.66 million viewers—by a margin of 1.6 percent. However, it’s worth remembering that last week was a post-pay-per-view show. That’s a factor that more often than not yields a positive uplift on viewership.

And furthermore the show featured the returns of Hulk Hogan and the Undertaker, with the latter then bringing to fruition a showdown with Brock Lesnar that has been years in the making.

Photo courtesy of WWE.com

Long story short: last week was big. And Raw was always going to struggle to be as much of a draw this time around.

So with that in mind, the marginal viewership dip would appear to be largely unproblematic.

But a comparison with last year’s numbers is somewhat less redeeming. The corresponding show from 2013 attracted an average of over five million viewers. Admittedly, it was the specially themed Old School Raw featuring the Rock as well as the return of the Undertaker, but that’s still a significant year-on-year drop of nearly nine percent.

It continues a trend whereby 2014 has been fairly consistently behind the 2013 figures. It’s also interesting to note that this year’s Old School Raw drew 4.54 million viewers. Though the context of the two years’ shows were different, that's still a pretty sizable decline of over 10.5 percent—which further reinforces the company's overall year-on-year drop.

But amidst all these statistics, the numbers and the analyses, there’s another interesting news story emerging that could settle this ongoing ratings battle.

PWInsider.com reports that WWE stock is at an “all-time high.” Presumably this is due to the launch of the WWE Network and the forecast success of the landmark WrestleMania XXX PPV. But, perhaps more importantly, it begs the question—do these television ratings really matter?

If the stock price is going up, and thus the company is being successful, does it really matter if TV viewership is falling slightly on an annual basis?

While such a decline is certainly not desirable, the health of the WWE’s stock price is perhaps a better measure of long-term success. This health is largely because the Network is looking to become a huge source of income for the company. The result is that television audiences could well become of less importance in the grand scheme of things.

Of course, I could be getting ahead of myself here. And, in an ideal world, the WWE would be seeing both stock prices and viewership rise. But if it had to be one of the two, I think the company would be satisfied that it’s the stock price performing more favourably.

But what do you guys think?

Is it an issue that TV audiences are declining year-on-year?

Or does the launch of the WWE Network and the benefits that it brings mean that this is not necessarily much of a problem anymore?

It would be really interesting to hear your views on this one, so please feel free to comment below with your thoughts on this matter as well as any of the points that were discussed in the article.