WWE SmackDown ratings up five percent with no sports competition

[Big Red Machine]

Source: www.F4WOnline.com

By Paul Fontaine | @PaulAceFontaine | May 30, 2019 11:50 am

Following a night in which Raw had its second lowest non-holiday audience in history, SmackDown was actually up five percent this week, averaging 2.072 million viewers for Tuesday's show.

This matched the April 23 episode for SmackDown's highest number since April's Superstar Shake-up.

The main reason for this week's increase would be the lack of competition, as both the NBA and NHL playoffs had the night off. SmackDown finished seventh overall for the night on cable, trailing only news programming, and topped the 18-49 demo with a 0.69 rating. In fact, in that demo, SmackDown beat everything on television with the exception of NBC, which was the only network to have first-run shows on Tuesday night.

SmackDown retained 95 percent of Raw's audience from the night before, which is much higher than usual and one of the highest percentages since the 2016 brand split. The only other times the retention number has been this high has been if it was a special episode of SmackDown, a big return had been announced, or if Raw fell on a bad night.

Raw did take place on Memorial Day, but that has historically not hurt Raw that badly. Last year's SmackDown following Memorial Day did 88 percent of the Raw audience. In 2017, the number was 89 percent.

Year-over-year, SmackDown was only down six percent, the second straight week the year-over-year decline was in the single digits. In fact, it was the best retention from the previous year that SmackDown has done since going back to October 30 of last year, when the decline was 0.4 percent.