Chris Jericho made headlines when he made a bold claim in relation to the ratings battle between AEW and WWE.
During a recent appearance on Busted Open Radio (h/t WrestleZone), Jericho suggested that it won't be long until AEW Dynamite tops Monday Night Raw in ratings:
"Sooner or later, we’re going to start beating RAW. It’s not going to be every week, but I bet you over the next 2-4 months, maybe 4-6, we’re going to start beating RAW, and that’s my prediction that I’m saying to you guys right here...We book smartly, if you watch our show it’s like watching the first three Star Wars episodes—one thing always leads to the next and sometimes you’ll see where the seeds were planted months earlier, but we always know what we want to do and where we want to go."
While it's easy for WWE fans to dismiss Jericho's statement here, the 50-year-old wrestling icon has good reason to believe that Dynamite will soon catch up to Raw. We just have to take a closer look at the numbers and trends.
Raw Viewership Continues To Trend Downward
In terms of television ratings, Raw is still averaging several hundred thousand more viewers per week than Dynamite. But numbers alone don't tell the story.
Per WrestlingInc.com's viewership tracker, Raw averaged 3.018 million viewers per episode in 2017. The average viewership has dropped every year (2020 averaged 1.880 million viewers). And only three episodes in 2021 have surpassed two million viewers, a mark that SmackDown has consistently reached.
While SmackDown continues to flourish with excellent booking across the roster, the same cannot be said about Raw. We're seeing the same old matches and feuds. It's also not uncommon to hear stories about Vince McMahon making last-minute changes to the show. That obviously doesn't scream "confidence" internally regarding his creative team.
Here's another problem for WWE: ESPN's 2021 NFL Monday Night Football program commences next week and will run through Jan. 3. So for the next four months, Raw will have serious competition amid declining ratings. There isn't much of a reason to think that the viewership will suddenly pick up over this period.
There's one potential solution on the horizon: The 2021 WWE Draft will reportedly be held next month. If Raw can gain a few more main event-caliber stars (Roman Reigns, Becky Lynch, Edge, Bianca Belair, Kevin Owens, Big E, Seth Rollins are among the talents who would help ), maybe that'll prompt more wrestling fans to watch Raw regularly again.
But it'll take more than a roster shake-up. Can WWE creative actually find ways to properly utilize these talents on Raw? For some reason, they've had a massive problem accomplishing that. And it's been the total opposite on SmackDown.
AEW: Viewership Moving Up & New Star Power
It's been nearly five months now since WWE NXT moved to Tuesday nights, thus ending the "Wednesday Night Wars" with Dynamite. As expected, the viewership for AEW's flagship program has skyrocketed significantly over time — especially over these last two months.
Per WrestlingInc.com's viewership tracker, six of the last eight episodes of Dynamite have recorded over one million viewers. The Aug. 11 and Aug. 18 shows also did very well, recording 979,000 and 975,000 viewers, respectively. It should be noted that the Aug. 25 episode, which marked CM Punk's first appearance on Dynamite, recorded 1.172 million viewers.
And a rare talent like CM Punk can single-handedly change the ratings, similar to how Hulk Hogan changed the game for WCW when he signed there in 1994.
16 days after CM Punk arrived in AEW, the company brought in Adam Cole and Bryan Danielson (Daniel Bryan in WWE) at the end of Sunday's All Out pay-per-view. Those are two other marquee, main event-caliber stars to build around, and you can also bet that those two will help in the ratings.
With no more direct competition from NXT, and with several new major wrestlers to build around, the sky's the limit for the AEW product. Viewership has already jumped considerably since July, and there's no reason to think it won't move up significiantly from here.
Raw may still do considerably better on a weekly basis. But while viewership has trended downward, Dynamite is moving into a completely different direction.
And that's why Jericho stands to look like an even greater genius in a few months down the road, if and likely when AEW catches up to Raw in the ratings battle.