The road to WWE Survivor Series made a stop in Manchester, England during WWE’s annual European tour. That meant the show was taped about five hours before it aired (credit those damn time zones!), which meant that a lot of fans could have read about the show on a website like ours before they watched Raw in order to see what happened and then decide if they wanted to watch. Whenever something like that takes place, most people assume things like television ratings will drop. In the case of this week’s Raw, that wasn’t the case at all.
This week’s edition of Raw featuring a Tag Team Title change in the main event did 2.841 million viewers as a three hour average according to Showbuzz Daily. That’s nearly identical to last week’s 2.854 million viewers. Both numbers are down from the 2.953 million viewers from two weeks ago.
The three hours of Raw had a slight change from the usual patter. Hour one started the night with 2.935 million viewers, hour two was the high of the three with 2.959 million viewers and the third hour did 2.630 million viewers. Normally, hour one leads the way when they are facing NFL Monday Night Football competition because the first half hour of Raw is not against the football game. This week’s third hour number is also a nice improvement over the 2.517 million viewers from last week in hour three.
Considering this was a taped show, I think WWE would likely be happy with that number. They didn’t advertise either of the big matches (Strowman vs. Miz and Tag Team Title match) beforehand, yet they were able to draw a good audience. That shows that there is a fair amount of interest in the product heading into Survivor Series. Perhaps the threat of an “invasion” from Smackdown helped too. While it wasn’t a physical attack, the presence of The New Day in the crowd is what caused Seth Rollins to get pinned by Sheamus in the Tag Team Title match. Speaking of that, if Raw didn’t want them on their show then why do they have microphones? In theory, Raw could cut the microphones out, but of course nothing happened. Let’s move on.
Next week’s Raw will feature the return of Roman Reigns after missing several weeks due to the mumps. It was weird that they didn’t promote it more heavily and just mentioned it in passing before the main event this week. Considering Reigns is such a big name, I figured they would have hyped it up more.
