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After at least two years of steady decline, AEW’s fan-driven (emphasize on fan-driven, because overall, i.e., business-to-business revenue, is very different story) metrics are moving in a positive direction, year-to-date. This is not a recovery of those recent years of consistent decline. But the numbers are no longer getting worse.
AEW Dynamite’s weekly cable ranking in the P18–49 demographic — a strong indicator of the program’s media value — has improved. Not dramatically, but clearly. From a low point near the start of 2025, the show has climbed back toward the #50 mark, surpassing it a few times so far this year. The median trend has bent upward.
Cable viewership, too, is up slightly. That is, it’s up sequentially, meaning ratings in more recent months of 2025 are doing better than ratings in the earlier months of the year. AEW’s cable viewership is not up year-over-year, as AEW CEO Tony Khan falsely claimed last week. Still far below where it was in 2023, but no longer falling. The 10-episode moving average shows growth, which is mild, but unlike anything seen in years — and it’s happening while the same program can be watched live on Max. Of course, Max viewership is not accounted for here and it’s questionable whether Warner Bros. Discovery is even sharing that secretive streaming data with AEW.
Attendance is our least-distorted signal, free (or freer) from the shift in how people consume media. Dynamite tapings are drawing more people, according to WrestleTix estimates of tickets distributed. After a long slide that bottomed out earlier this year, ticket estimates per event have risen for the last few months. Note that the June 18 Arena Mexico attendance — which may have been as high as 14,000 — was not included in the data shown above, as WrestleTix has yet to provide an estimate for that event, and maybe you could argue that’s an international outlier that should be put in a separate category. Regardless, it’s notable that the trend is positive without that high data point.
These positive trends — in TV rank, total viewers, and tickets distributed — are observable across multiple metrics. Not one cherry-picked analysis. And I’m not aware of compelling data that undermines a narrative that fan interest in AEW is actually stabilizing or mildly turning around.
To reiterate for any partisans who may have trouble with the nuance, this data does not show that AEW is back where it was in 2023. And it’s not close to 2022. But after a stretch where a decline in fan metrics was consistent and seemingly continuous, there’s meaningful data here to strongly suggest the momentum has started moving in a more favorable direction.
How much does this matter in the big picture of AEW’s business? If this was a prior era: a lot. In this era: somewhat. Revenues driven directly by consumers — like ticket, pay-per-view, and merchandise sales — almost certainly account for less than half of AEW’s business. The majority of the company’s revenue — like that of WWE — is generated from broadcast rights fees to its weekly TV shows. Those fees are locked in by multi-year guaranteed contracts. Those deals depend on a large audience, but it’s more important how the size of the audience compares to live viewership of programming generally.
So even with a shrinking audience, a program can maintain or increase its value if traditional TV viewing overall is declining even faster — which is exactly what happened with AEW’s 2024 rights renewal and with many of WWE’s major renewals in recent decades.
Brandon Thurston
brandon@wrestlenomics.com
Brandon Thurston has written about wrestling business since 2015. He operates and owns Wrestlenomics.