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Since originally posting the TV ratings chart and table below, from data gathered by wrestling historian Cory Gibson, readers have raised a good question:
But wasn’t Hulk Hogan vs. Andre the Giant on Feb. 5, 1988 watched by 33 million viewers?
The number, according to Nielsen data, was actually 26.64 million viewers — still extremely impressive and probably the biggest pro wrestling television audience in at least U.S. history. The often repeated 33 million number did appear in newspapers at the time but it likely resulted from hasty mathematical assumptions based on the number of households that watched the program, combined with an overestimation of viewers per household, as I’ll explain here.
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But wait, even if the whole show averaged 26.64 million viewers, was 33 million the audience for the Hogan-Andre match itself?
Over 28 million, yes. But we don’t have data showing it got up to as high as 33 million. The program was a one-hour show and the Hogan vs. Andre match took place mostly in the last 15 minutes. The second half-hour of The Main Event that night was watched by an average of 28.45 million viewers. The first half-hour, which included Randy Savage vs. The Honky Tonk Man, averaged 24.85 million viewers.
So how do we know any of this? We have below the Nielsen “Pocketpiece” document (published by Nielsen itself) with data for the telecast. Gibson received this data from the operator of the now-defunct RatingsRyan website.
The data from Nielsen here states clearly there were 13,640,000 households watching Friday Night’s Main Event on NBC on Feb. 5, 1988.
Then, confusingly to our modern reading of TV ratings, rather than showing a straight forward viewership number, it shows that there were 1,953 viewers per 1,000 viewing households.
How do we get the number of total viewers from that? With algebra of course.
RatingsRyan had a calculator tool (still available via the Wayback Machine) that possibly took the estimate of television households in each TV season into account. The calculator provides the slightly different viewership number: 26,640,000.
The Philadelphia Inquirer, on the following Tuesday, and several publications thereafter reported the viewership as “about 33 million”. This figure might’ve been inaccurately calculated based on an assumption that the average number of viewers per household was closer to 2.4, rather than the 1.95 Nielsen actually measured. Newspapers from The Buffalo News to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram repeated the Inquirer’s figure, either making the same incorrect assumption or simply reiterating it without attribution to the Inquirer. (Maybe reporting pro wrestling ratings hasn’t changed much in the last 38 years.) However, these outlets did accurately relay that the household rating for The Main Event was 15.2 with a 25 share, consistent with Nielsen’s Pocketpiece.
This exercise isn’t meant to diminish the record-setting television audience achieved by the WWF, Hulk Hogan, and Andre the Giant—a record that may never be surpassed given increasingly fragmented entertainment options. And I’m certainly not trying to ignite another Wrestlemania III-level data controversy. Rather, the intent here is simply to accurately clarify for posterity what the true high point for viewership in all of U.S. wrestling history actually was.
To put the Hogan-Andre rating in some perspective, its 26.64 million viewers (and 28.45 million in the last half-hour while the match was happening) is more than just about any regular season NFL in primetime so far in 2024. Only the Thanksgiving night Packers vs. Dolphins — simulcasting on NBC, Peacock, Telemundo, and other platforms — equaled the 26.6 million viewers of Friday Night’s Main Event. The Hogan-Andre audience is bigger than the largest audience of any 2024-to-date Monday Night Football game (the highest one averaging 20.5 million viewers), Sunday Night Football game (highest, 21.7 million) and Thursday Night Football (highest, 17.3 million). The television and entertainment environment today is far more competitive than in 1988. This change all but guarantees the Hogan-Andre record is safe. However, there’s also a considerably larger national population today from which to draw audiences. There are about 345 million people living in the U.S. in 2024. In 1988, the population was 29% smaller, at 245 million.
Big thanks to Cory Gibson from collecting this data, providing source material, and answering my questions.
Brandon Thurston has written about wrestling business since 2015. He operates and owns Wrestlenomics.