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The new year meant that AEW Dynamite and Collision began simulcasting on Max as well as their home cable networks, TBS and TNT. It’s important for AEW to widen its distribution, making the weekly programs accessible to millions of additional homes.

However, the data from the first episodes suggests the impact on traditional TV viewership has been minimal. Ratings for Dynamite and Collision—we have three episodes total so far—remain consistent with previous trends.

Viewership for Dynamite on TBS in the first two episodes since the simulcast began has remained stable, with 588,000 and 615,000 viewers, averaging 602,000. This is nearly identical to the December average of 595,000. The P18-49 demographic shows a similar trend, with the first two episodes averaging 221,000 viewers (0.16 rating) compared to the December average of 239,000 (0.18), indicating a slight if significant change.

For Collision on TNT, the January 4 episode, the only one aired since the simulcast started, delivered 345,000 viewers. Excluding the December 21 episode, which benefited from a massive College Football Playoff lead-in, the other two December episodes averaged 262,000 viewers. This suggests viewership for Collision may have slightly increased with the simulcast. Notably, the January 4 episode performed almost identically to November’s average of 346,000 viewers.

Maybe future months will provide clearer insights into how this impacts viewership across platforms.

There have been no announcements nor have heard what viewership is like on Max. The absence of such messaging might indicate that the early results have not yet demonstrated a transformative impact on total viewership numbers.

The move simulcast on streaming matters as pay TV continues to lose its coverage—now in just 51% of U.S. households, according to a recent MoffettNathanson analysis. Max is in about 50 million U.S. homes. (It’s hard to decipher exactly because Warner Bros. Discovery’s reporting lumps Max in with Discovery+ subscribers.) Some but certainly not all Max subscribers are non-cable homes. Many of those subscribers get the service as part of their traditional HBO premium add-on to their cable bill. Max is in the lower end of the top 10 streaming services in terms of actual usage on televisions, according to Nielsen’s “The Gauge”.

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The gate for the premiere of WWE Monday Night Raw on Netflix at the Intuit Dome on Monday was $4.8 million, likely including ticket fees, according to a source.

The last known arena gate record for WWE was $3.3 million for Money in the Bank in London. That record was broken twice in 2024, by Backlash in France and Bash in Berlin, but we don’t know what those gate figures were.

Assuming about 90% of the estimated 17,003 tickets distributed (per WrestleTix) were sold, that results in an estimated ticket price of around $314.

The event also sold $459,000 in venue merchandise sales. To estimate a venue merch per capita number, assuming 90% of the estimated 17,003 tickets distributed were sold, we’d get a merch per ticket sold of $30.

For posterity, when adjusting for inflation, each of the Wrestlemania events in Atlantic City in 1988 and 1989 are ahead of this record. Both gates are listed on prowrestlinghistory.com as $2.3 million. The gate for Wrestlemania 4 in 1988 would be $6.2 million in today’s dollars and Wrestlemania 5 in 1989 would now be $5.9 million. (Calculated using the government’s inflation calculator.)

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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.