WOS Wrestling Ratings

I'm more inclined to think that you'll have BBC News at 6, plus the regional news. That will be followed by Doctor Who, then Countryfile, then the Strictly results, leading up to the 9pm drama slot. I think that looks more likely than anything else.

I'm a little suprised that they are moving it from Saturdays, wondering if they're trying to avoid scheduling it against WOS Wrestling, which seems to doing rather well in the 5pm slot right now.

That still makes it the most popular wrestling programme in the UK, by more than 100%. That's not too shabby.

Well WOS Wrestling is moving earlier (to accommodate yet another Harry Potter season) and only has 4 weeks left to run.

I wonder how WWE would do if it was on ITV? Because that's why WOS is so popular, it's because it's on a free terrestrial channel and not paywalled Sky.

Sunday has become the night for the biggest ratings, so it makes sense to move Doctor Who. If the show doesn’t perform well, it certainly won’t be because the viewers aren’t around.

As for the wrestling on ITV, I’m not sure why some people are describing it as ‘popular’. It gets a very poor audience of about 400k, will certainly be below the slot average and has already been shunted forward to 4:30pm. It certainly wouldn’t have played any part in moving Doctor Who’s timeslot, that’s for sure.

I don't think that's all of it by a long shot. Impact Wrestling was on Challenge, which was on Freeview, and yes, they used to beat WWE fairly regularly, but never by anywhere near as much as WOS is. Pro Wrestling is slowly gaining more mainstream attention, and WOS is benefiting in part by that too. There's a number of factors coming together, and the fact that its not behind the Sky paywall is just part of it, not all of it, by a long chalk.

It's not always about how many are watching but who is watching. If they are reaching a high proportion of younger males for example they would probably be happy with that as it's a demographic that ITV probably finds hard to reach ordinarily.

Maybe not, but compared to current WWE numbers, that's amazing. Raw last week was 39,000; SmackDown was 46,000. Next to that, 400k is really good. I remember when WWE was regularly getting around 100k and more for broadcasts of RAW and SmackDown.

And how many Wrestling programmes are on one of the major free to air channels?

Some demographics were released for the first episode, and it didn’t skew particularly well with the younger male audience. It doesn’t seem to be a trendy sport amongst young people. ITV rarely move shows out of their original timelsots, pushing it earlier is a sign that they aren’t pleased with its performance. 400k might be good in comparison to other wrestling shows, but it certainly isn’t any good for ITV. I’d be very surprised if it returned for another series.

For ITV that's really just couldn't-be-bothered-to-change-the-channel numbers.

It's pretty much all it is - you've already said that WWE figures are sinking; 400k is embarrassingly low and a sign that the chances of it coming back again are slim to nil.