Raw Ratings

PW.Net wrote:Monday's WWE Raw scored a 3.46 rating, up from the 3.12 rating the show drew the previous week. As previously noted, Raw averaged 4.869 million viewers, up from the 4.537 million average from last week.

Shore's Slant A big lift for WWE with the first hour doing he bulk of the work. It looks like once everyone saw Batista they tuned out. My concern is that's only going to convince Vince McMahon that he needs more big names returning instead of fixing the milquetoast midcard.

Dave Meltzer wrote:Raw did something of an amazing 4.86 million viewers on Monday night and the big story was the ratings pattern.

   8 p.m. 5.25 million
   9 p.m. 5.00 million
   10 p.m. 4.36 million

The story is the huge open and the huge drop during the show.  The big thing hyped, for weeks, was the return of Batista.  If anyone tries to attribute the rating to anything but that, they are fooling themselves.  Without quarters, it's hard to know exactly where the fall-off was, but it was huge.  It would appear bringing Batista out early likely caused a lot of viewers to tune out.  Just as obvious, there was not that much interest in the show-long waiting for John Cena to confront Randy Orton storyline.

Raw had its biggest audience since football season, doing 4.23 million viewers last night.

It was a unique ratings pattern in that the first hour, stemming from interest in Survivor Series, Sting's debut, The Authority being gone, led to 4.73 million viewers on average in that hour. There were significantly more than that there at the start and they lost viewers steady even in the first hour.

The audience dropped greatly from there, to just slightly above usual levels with 3.99 million viewers in the second hour and 4.01 million viewers in the third hour.

The Ravens-Saints NFL game last night did 10.87 million viewers, one of the lowest numbers of the season.

By Dave Meltzer, WrestlingObserver.com

WWE's Monday Night Raw numbers were the highest they've had since RAW 1000 (2012) benefiting from the positive buzz from a great WrestleMania show Sunday as well as no competition from the NCAA men's basketball tournament.

TV By The Numbers had times listed all wrong so these hours could be incorrect, but the show did an average of 5.35 million viewers.

The three hours were 5.60 million viewers, 5.23 million viewers and 5.27 million viewers, but it's not clear which hour each is. The big number was either in the first or second hour.

The Hall of Fame show that aired after Raw did 2,105,000 viewers.