“Hugging it out” is evidently not as popular with the WWE audience as it was with the “Entourage” crowd.
While the hugging segments between Kane and Daniel Bryan have generated positive reactions on social media, when it comes to live television viewership, the response has been far less kind.
The initial segment on Labor Day, which was deliberately lengthy in order to keep viewers hooked, actually lost 55,000 viewers at the top of the 10PM hour, a segment typically known to gain hundreds of thousands of viewers.
According to F4WOnline.com, a drop-off yet again occurred during the “hug it out” segment on this week’s RAW. Though the first portion of their match gained a healthy 362,000 viewers from the prior segment, the quarter hour involving the hug, which again fell during the prime 10-10:15PM slot, lost a staggering 169,000 viewers.
The bleed continued with the Randy Orton vs. Tensai and Damien Sandow vs. Zack Ryder matches also losing viewers, which explains why the third hour of Monday Night RAW drew such a disappointing viewership number.
Though online response to the hugging aspect of the storyline has been generally positive, there have been some doubters who question whether it belongs on a wrestling show. But the Kane-Bryan storyline, overall, has been nearly-unanimously praised, and yet it still fails to be attracting significant interest from the WWE Universe.
