As it stands, the overall rating and viewership for Monday’s RAW, which featured the return of The Rock and an intense build for WrestleMania 28, was a major disappointment.
And a quarter-hour breakdown reveals that the heavily-hyped segment that specifically involved The Rock was a particular disappointment in its own right.
According to the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, the 11-11:15 portion of Monday’s RAW garnered a viewership increase of only 643,000 over the previous segment. Given the significance of the segment–The Rock’s rebuttal to John Cena’s heated promo from the prior week–that viewership gain, an average increase that one could expect for a run-of-the-mill RAW main-event, was well below expectations.
By comparison, a recent segment involving Triple H and Undertaker gained over a million viewers from the prior quarter.
Worse, the final few minutes of the segment actually suffered a viewership erosion. The remaining portion lost 349,000 viewers from the 11-11:15 segment, indicating that the interaction between Rock and Cena was failing to keep viewers hooked.
While the initial reaction might be to question whether Cena is alienating viewers (after all, the ratings did trail off when he appeared), it is likely not that simple. For starters, it is not like The Rock’s solo interview was doing monster numbers anyway. Moreover, Cena has, more often than not, been one of the key quarter-hour ratings draws on WWE television, so it would be surprising if WWE viewers suddenly soured on him.
More likely, casual viewers simply didn’t see this segment as that big of a deal, and once the clock neared 11:15, viewers conditioned not to expect RAW content beyond that point either turned their televisions off or switched to their usual late-night programming.
It is also possible that the viewers who tune-in for the post-RAW show, which normally begins at around 11:05, trailed off as the Rock-Cena segment dragged on, realizing that their show was not going to start until far later than usual.
No matter the cause, given how effective most critics believe the Cena and Rock promos have been thus far, it is disappointing that the audience exposed to the content has been minimal. The feeling is that those engaged with the promos are as likely to buy a WWE pay-per-view as they ever have been, and so WWE really needs to get more eyeballs on the interactions.
