Raw ratings remain low even with significant hype

Even with the advertising of the announcement of both brands General Managers and a Dean Ambrose vs. Seth Rollins title match, Raw last night did 3.13 million viewers, down a bit from the 3.17 million from last week.

The show was probably hurt by the Republican National Convention, as Fox News coverage pushed Raw down to ninth place on cable for the night when it’s usually been third in recent weeks.

The third hour, with the Ambrose vs. Rollins match, dropped in virtually every demo and the hour fell under 3 million viewers. Since WWE title matches on Raw are rare, this was the clearest sign perhaps ever of the lack of value to the viewing audience of the WWE title.

The title match was promoted, but not as heavily as tonight’s Smackdown, which should do a big number, and they also had to promote Battleground.

It should also be noted that while cable competition was tougher, network viewing was down with the convention on so many different platforms.

The network coverage was against Raw’s third hour only, with 3.64 million viewers on ABC, 2.70 million viewers no CBS, 3.91 million viewers on NBC, 3.94 million viewers on CNN and 6.35 million viewers on Fox News.

Fox News also did strong against Raw with the O’Reilly Factor doing 5.09 million viewers against hour one and The Kelly File doing 5.07 million viewers against hour two.

The three hours of Raw were:

8 p.m. 3.20 million viewers
9 p.m. 3.24 million viewers
10 p.m. 2.96 million viewers