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Netflix announced on Thursday that the premier of WWE Monday Night Raw was watched by 2.6 million U.S. households, live+same-day, according to its third-party analytics partner VideoAmp.
Analysis: The measurement methodology is close to how Nielsen would measure viewership, and we do have Nielsen data for households watching Raw throughout its history. Suffice to say this was the biggest audience for Raw in the U.S. since 2018.
Despite my urging of skepticism of any metrics WWE or Netflix would announce following the debut, they provided data that does allow us to compare the performance on Netflix to that of Raw on the USA Network.
The audience for Raw in its premiere on Netflix was about twice the size of the audience watching on USA Network throughout 2024, when the show averaged 1.22 million households. That’s in the U.S. That’s live+same-day, the same as Netflix’s announced number.
It’s notable that the data, though it is not from Nielsen, is from third-party VideoAmp. And it is true that VideoAmp recently measured the Golden Globes as having a 9% larger audience than Nielsen, which suggests VideoAmp might be more generous than Nielsen.
Even so, if we assume Nielsen is more accurate and VideoAmp also measured the Raw premiere as 9% too high, that would give us a household measurement for the premiere of about 2.3 million or 2.4 million households. Still around double the average of Raw on the USA Network in 2024.
How many actual viewers were watching? Probably around 3.5 million viewers. Since 2012, Raw on USA averaged 1.4 (rounded to the first decimal place) viewers per household. I have data for every episode and it doesn’t appear co-viewing was strongly correlated to viewership. That is, it doesn’t appear that higher viewership is related to a higher rate of viewers per home.
Netflix also claimed, “[t]he event also more than doubled the A18-49 audience vs. last year.” The full year 2024 average P18-49 rating for Raw was 0.53 (707,000 viewers in the age group). Again, this is not a perfect science as the Netflix data is based on households, but you can read that as Netflix essentially claiming the Raw premiere delivered around a 1.0 P18-49 rating (or about 1.4 million in the demo).
Globally, Netflix reported the show had 4.9 million “views” (hours watched divided by duration), which again is a measurement close to Nielsen’s average minute audience (AMA) method, and it is “Live+1”, similar to live+same-day. However, this data is first-party and not from VideoAmp which I believe is only providing Netflix with data for U.S. viewership. If we take this data for granted, though, it implies that with much of the globe having live access, with the exception of India which moves to Netflix in April, that about 53% of the live+same-day viewership of the Raw premiere was U.S.