Analyzing Quarter-Hour Viewership for AEW Dynamite and WWE NXT

Here we’ll analyze every quarter-hour of AEW Dynamite and WWE NXT since October 2019 up to today. Doing so will be complicated, but we’ll take note of which wrestlers or personalities appeared most frequently in quarter-hours that performed well in viewership.

We’ll be referencing viewership reported in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter. Some of the viewership data I obtained directly.

I need to start with a sanctimonious lecture.

Relatively speaking, I know there’s a good amount of interest for an analysis of quarter-hour viewership for AEW Dynamite and WWE NXT. And that’s a component of what makes me hesitant to publish an analysis on it. To be direct: I don’t trust a large audience to interpret this analysis in a level-headed manner. Which is why it’s being reserved exclusively for you, the trustworthy and intelligent supporters of Wrestlenomics on Patreon.

I think there’s an appetite for this subject because readers expect a quarter-hour analysis will unlock endings to petty wrestling debates. I think the results — like much other emotionally-fraught information in our lives — will be read by many readers in a way that comforts a variety of biases, including contradictory ones. 

So while I’m going to present the information in the most meaningful way I think is possible, I discourage broad conclusions being drawn from this analysis. In other words, I think it would be foolhardy if you took to Twitter and declared that you’ve been right all along, referencing this as your proof that your favorite (or least favorite) wrestler is (or isn’t) a draw.

A quarter-hour analysis is opaque. A minute-by-minute analysis would be more transparent, but it’s doubtful much minute-by-minute data will be made public.

Why is a quarter-hour analysis opaque?

1. One of the biggest factors affecting viewership for these programs is commercial breaks. More than 100,000 viewers move to and from either program during their respective commercial breaks. Those breaks are not consistently organized at the borders between the 15-minute segments that are analyzed here.

2. Many quarter-hours include partial or multiple matches/promos. Again, lacking minute-by-minute data, we lack the ability to look into which part of the 15 minutes coincided with gains or losses in viewers.

These two factors, and possibly others, complicate wrestling fans’ desire to attribute viewership gain or loss to personalities: to declare who attracts viewers — or does not.

There are other issues to adjust for too, like quarter bias. There are three quarters that consistently gain viewers: Q1 (the beginning of the show), Q5 (the top of the second hour), and Q8 (the main event).

Likewise, quarters that aren’t Q1, Q5, or Q8 consistently lose viewers.

For AEW, the average quarter-to-quarter (QTQ) gain/loss in viewers looks like this:

And for NXT, it looks like this:

We will attempt to adjust for those factors by measuring quarter-to-quarter growth, then adding the average percentage of gained or lost viewers that quarter does over the lifetime of the program (seen above).

You’ll notice I’m discarding trends related to Q1 entirely. Q1 is often influenced by the viewership of the program that just ended, and it’s a stretch to attribute viewership trends to the individuals appearing on-screen. By definition, there’s no QTQ growth/loss to measure for Q1. And we don’t have quarter-hour viewership data for the programs that preceded NXT or Dynamite.

I’m aware the Wrestling Observer Newsletter many years ago did a quarter-hour analysis of WWE programming (I think it was Raw), attributing +/- stats to each wrestler over a wide timeline of shows. I won’t be doing that here. I believe matches, promos, and video packages each have different viewership tendencies: i.e., matches draw viewership best, followed by promos, and video packages. Further, it would be imprecise, maybe to the point of changing someone’s +/- result completely, to attribute such a statistic based on 15-minute segments when individuals frequently appear for only a portion of the quarter-hour, and almost always along with other key individuals.

I’ll instead focus on the top 10 and bottom 10 of quarter-hours that performed best (and worst) in QTQ growth (or loss) in the P18-49.

Because P18-49 is the key demographic that drives advertising revenue, we will focus on that metric for now. P2+ is not without importance, and we may include it in analysis in the future. I have not yet looked deeply into it, but I can say the results of this analysis focusing on P18-49 do not necessarily correlate strongly with that of P2+.

TOP 20 AEW ADJ QTQ TABLE

TOP 20 NXT ADJ QTQ TABLE

BOTTOM 20 AEW ADJ QTQ TABLE

BOTTOM 20 NXT ADJ QTQ

For AEW, the most frequent names that appear in the top 20 list are Cody (five times), Jon Moxley, and Chris Jericho (four each). Other names that appear more than once include Adam Page, Britt Baker, Hikaru Shida, Jake Roberts, Kenny Omega, Orange Cassidy, Sammy Guevara, and the Young Bucks.

For NXT, some of the names are more surprising. Kushida and Tommaso Ciampa lead with mentions in the top 20 list. They’re followed by Cameron Grimes, Dexter Lumis, Finn Balor, Timothy Thatcher, and Velveteen Dream, each with three. Adam Cole, Austin Theory, Dakota Kai, Io Shirai, Johnny Gargano, Matt Riddle, and Rhea Riply each appear more than once.

You may view the spreadsheet used for this analysis here.

Thanks as always for supporting Wrestlenomics!

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