Full reports aren’t in yet for last Friday night’s television programming, but Programming Insider has the latest WWE SmackDown scoring a .29 rating in the 18-49 year old demographic for Jan. 30’s episode on USA Network. That’s a 32% jump from the previous Friday.
A more complete picture came in for last Thursday’s TNA Impact Wrestling on AMC and Saturday’s AEW Collision on TNT. PWTorch reported 201,000 viewers and a .04 demo rating for Impact’s third episode in its new home, a 17.5% week-to-week
increase in total audience and a 33% jump in 18-49. Collision nearly doubled its previous episode’s viewership on Jan. 31 with 492K, and saw its rating hit .07 — a 250% rise.
We’re big Tommaso Ciampa fans, but… come on. So what gives?
Remember last year when Nielsen moved to a new ratings calculation formula they called Panel + Big Data? Well. last Monday Variety reported that the service was tweaking the formula. The move comes after complaints, including from WWE NXT media rights-holder The CW, about how Nielsen’s changes hurt pretty much anything that was scripted or on tape.
Nielsen isn’t offering a full explanation of the changes, of course (it’s their own proprietary blend of herbs and spices, after all) — but they’ve shared enough that Variety could offer an explanation:
Nielsen has informed its clients that it will start incorporating results from a study of consumer behavior in TV and digital media done by the Advertising Research Foundation, an organization that presses for unified standards of research in advertising and marketing. Its board of directors includes executives from Bank of America, Comscore and Coca-Cola Co…
The new data is expected to be added to Nielsen’s ratings methodology this week, according to two people familiar with the matter, and could result in a one-time expansion of the number of households, or “universe,” watching cable and broadcast TV, and a potential diminution of the overall audience watching streaming.
We turn to Wrestlenomics in times like these, and here’s Brandon Thurston on the changes that Nielsen put into effect last week:
This has coincided with multi-month highs for all wrestling programs we track that are on traditional TV. That includes what we know of Smackdown’s viewership in P18-49 (0.29), which would be the highest in that demo since Nov. 21, 2025. Dynamite last week had it highest total viewership (653,000) since Sept. 17, 2025 (when panel-only was still the primary methodology) and its highest P18-49 (0.09) since Dec. 10, 2025. NXT’s total viewership (674,000) was its highest since Oct. 14, 2025, though its P18-49 rating (0.08) was the same as the prior week). Impact’s Week 3 on AMC P18-49 rating was notably equal to its debut number. More time and data needs to gather, but so far, the early data suggests the methodology change is at least partly offsetting the negative differences programs including pro wrestling have experienced since the Big Data + Panel became primary in late September, which we reported on in detail a few months ago.
For now, with only a handful of data points, we can’t really tell how impressive Impact, SmackDown, and Collision’s increases were. But we’ll keep paying attention to ratings for you, and do our best to keep you updated.
What do you make of Nielsen’s changes and their impact on pro wrestling?
