WWE Raw beats NFL Draft.

by Jon Lewis

19 years ago

Jon Lewis has been covering the sports media industry on a daily basis since 2006 as the founder and main writer of Sports Media Watch. You can contact him here or on the social media websites X (Twitter) or Bluesky.

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Comments 3

Anonymous says:

19 years ago

what about people like me that watched (some of) the draft on the NFL Network and not the Four Letter?

I wonder what the total draft day viewership was when you combine the two channels.
Monty says:

19 years ago

Obviously, ESPN has an invested interest in the viewing public buying into the belief that the NFL Draft is one of the biggest / most important weekends in sports. After all, they are the ones that broadcast it. It’s the same thing with ESPN and NASCAR. Sell it like it’s important, perhaps people will start to believe it.
Morgan Wick says:

19 years ago

Keep a couple things in mind:

-Raw is actually a two-hour show that is sold as two one-hour shows so that WWE and USA can charge advertisers more on the more-watched second hour. (I’ve watched it – which is a very, very sad thing to admit – and the break between hours is imperceptible if you’re not extremely observant.) Hour 2 doesn’t beat the draft by much, and the first hour has significantly fewer viewers than the second (4.65 mil to 5.16, according to the Forbes article).

-I seem to recall reading an ESPN press release last year saying the very start of the draft got some rating over 5. By its nature, the draft bleeds enough viewers to make a leech happy as it goes along, especially as it enters the second round. I personally believe the second round should be treated with only a slightly lower level of respect than the first, but I’m in the minority among the general public, especially given the inconsistent nature of how ESPN covers that round from year to year. ESPN shuttled coverage to ESPN2 to make way for the NBA Playoffs at 8p ET, which may stop the bleeding on the number reported by Nielsen, but I can’t imagine, if ESPN’s coverage of the second round is taken in isolation, that that number turns out to be much more than a 3 rating. That would mean over 3 million viewers but not a heck of a lot more than that.

-By any measure, both of them get their asses whooped by “The Sopranos”.

Incidentially, Raw gets better ratings than almost any regular season NBA, MLB, or NHL game, or any NHL playoff game for that matter, and also does numbers comparable to NBA first-round playoff games. Think about that.