On his 83 Weeks podcast, Eric Bischoff and his panel (Raj Giri and Conrad Thompson) discussed a topic affecting the entire pro-wrestling industry: Nielsen has completely changed how TV ratings are calculated, and the early results have been catastrophic for WWE and AEW.
Analyst Raj Giri explaining how dramatic the collapse has been: “Man, it’s been brutal for wrestling… beyond anything we’ve ever seen.”
According to him, Nielsen’s old system used only 42,000 households as the core measurement sample: “Up until now it had been a pool of about 42,000 subscribers… that make up the total audience.”
But now, Nielsen has rolled out a new “big data” system that incorporates:
– Streaming numbers
– Out-of-home viewing
– Real-time trends
– 45 million devices
Despite adding more measurement sources, wrestling ratings have plummeted:
SmackDown: lowest 18–49 rating ever
AEW Dynamite: lowest viewership ever
Tuesday head-to-head: NXT destroyed AEW
AND most alarming: “Every show has done their all-time lowest.”
After seeing that all major sports went up while wrestling cratered, Raj floated a controversial theory:
“It could be a conspiracy… wrestling is eating up a lot of ad dollars… you can make it a little tough on their advertising by crunching their numbers just a little bit.”
He clarified he wasn’t outright claiming wrongdoing, but said it’s hard to explain why wrestling alone is collapsing.
Another theory offered is that wrestling benefited from the flaws of the old Nielsen system. Specifically, Nielsen may have oversampled certain demographics more likely to watch wrestling, such as lower-income households:
“Maybe Nielsen oversampled the demographics that are more likely to watch wrestling… maybe lower income were oversampled.”
Under the new system, those favorable oversamplings vanish. In short:
Old system = wrestling got boosted
New system = cold, hard, accurate numbers… and they’re bad
Raj bluntly described the situation as a disaster for wrestling, beyond anything we’ve ever seen.
With the new 45-million-device system, wrestling may never again reach the ratings numbers fans were used to.
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