Cross Examination: Combating The WWE Ratings Drop

It’s about time for the annual “why are the WWE ratings down” discussions.

Every time the ratings fall, the same things happen. There’s rumors of Vince McMahon becoming more controlling. Monday Night Football gets blamed. Fans worry about .

There are plenty of possible reasons for the ratings drop. Maybe the stagnant and boring booking has pushed people away. Maybe it’s too much of a chore to watch a three-hour show. Maybe Hulu and DVRs have sopped away some of the live viewers. Maybe the large contingent of Sheamus fans are mad he hasn’t cashed in his briefcase yet.

Okay, only three of those theories are plausible. Regardless, there is not a single cause of the drop. To figure out why the ratings are falling, the first step is to look at the ratings.

The Nielsen ratings are determined by taking the number of televisions that are tuned in to a given program—in this case, WWE Raw—and dividing it by the number of TVs in the United States. Last week’s rating was a 2.35, which means 2.35 percent of households with TVs in the United States were tuned to Raw last week. Nielsen estimates the number of households with TVs in the U.S.A. this year is 113,314,340, which means there were 2,662,887 households watching Raw live on cable this week. Obviously, some of those households had more than one person watching at a time, which explains why the viewership for the episode was 3.378 million.

Since pro wrestling is considered by many to be a niché subject, more than three million viewers is nothing to sneeze at. That’s more than any scripted cable show with the exception of a Walking Dead companion show. Outside of live sports, presidential debates and zombies, Raw is ahead of basically every cable show on TV.

Of course, in September 2012, Raw was getting four million viewers a week, so there’s still been a drop. But Raw isn’t the only show that’s lost viewers in the past few years. Long-running shows like NCIS, Modern Family and Suits have all, on average, lost viewers over the past few years.

In fact, with the exception of hugely popular shows like Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead, pretty much every scripted show has lost Nielsen viewers over the past few years. This is not a WWE-exclusive problem. For years, people have stopped watching TV in the traditional method and have been consuming content on nontraditional platforms like Netflix, Hulu and DVRs. While this trend is not limited to the 18-49 demographic, it’s fair to say it’s more pronounced among younger people than older people. The dropping ratings are not entirely a WWE problem, but there are plenty of things WWE can do to fix the problem.

One could argue although Raw is scripted, it’s at least live, and live content is the best antidote to people watching things on nontraditional platforms. That’s true, but pro wrestling is not as pervasive in American society as the NFL or reality shows like Dancing With the Stars. It’s not difficult to miss Raw and avoid being spoiled—it’s nearly impossible to miss the score of the Eagles game. Still, Raw being live is doubtlessly a big reason why its ratings are better than SmackDown’s ratings.

What’s crazy is WWE is promoting one of the things keeping its ratings down. The WWE Network is a perfect example of a nontraditional platform, and WWE is promoting it like only the WWE can—by constantly mentioning it and calling it better than Netflix (a slogan they should drop until “WWE Network and chill” goes viral). WWE is actively encouraging people to spend even more time watching wrestling, which is crazy. It’s dumb enough to expect everyone to watch Raw, SmackDown, Superstars, Main Event and pay-per-views—now they want people to watch Network content too? It’s too much wrestling, even for superfans. They’re creating so much content and distributing it across so many different platforms, and it’s stretching people thin. Other companies like Ring of Honor, Pro Wrestling Guerilla, New Japan Pro Wrestling, and others are more accessible than ever, and many fans are attached to those companies.

The WWE Network is making plenty of money, and WWE certainly shouldn’t lessen the amount of content to give fans more time to watch competitors, but they definitely should recognize they offer too much. It’s great that the WWE YouTube channel gets so many views, but putting the ending to every televised match online for free just encourages people to read recaps and visit the channel instead of watching Raw. They do a pretty good job of making Raw a social networking event. That’s key to getting live viewers.

WWE needs to make the show more must-see, though. Cena’s United States Open Challenge is perfect for that, except he never loses. When he finally does lose it for good, it should be cleanly on Raw. That would make a moment worth watching live. The Dudley Boyz making a surprise return was a moment worth watching live. There hasn’t been many of those lately, and there should be one of those most weeks. Although it was entertaining, the human resources representative bit did not qualify as a moment worth watching live.

WWE is better at most companies at adapting to change. After a slow start, the WWE Network has taken off. WWE also has the built-in advantage of name recognition. It’s the only wrestling promotion everyone knows about and, for many, the only one worth watching. The other companies are good in their own right but will never be as big as WWE.

However, the leaders in sports entertainment need to recognize their biggest source of money isn’t t-shirts, Network subscriptions or ticket sales—it’s the television rights deals. Unless they’re planning on finding $200 million elsewhere, they need to step back and figure out a way to embrace new media while keeping old media happy. Then maybe the ratings will go back up.

Or they’ll just strap Cena.

Wrestledelphia.com columnist Evan Cross can be reached at . Follow him on Twitter .