Wednesday Night Wars: AEW And NXT Ratings Bounce Back From World Series Drop For Closest Week Yet

After suffering drop in the ratings thanks to the 2019 World Series, AEW Dynamite and WWE NXT bounce back to the closest week yet in the ratings.

AEW Dynamite won out, with the go-home show for Saturday’s pay-per-view, Full Gear, drawing 822,000 viewers. The episode was punctuated with a widely praised promo by Cody for his title match against AEW World Champion Chris Jericho on Saturday and a chaotic brawl as the episode ended.

However, WWE NXT garnered 813,000 viewers on the heels of NXT’s “invasions” of SmackDown and RAW ahead of Nov. 24’s Survivor Series. The build-up continued as RAW stars AJ Styles, Karl Anderson and Luke Gallows invaded and faced NXT stars Matt Riddle, Keith Lee, and Tommaso Ciampa in the main event.

This made for the closest week in the ratings for both shows since they had their two-hour debuts on Oct. 2 on TNT and USA Network, respectively.

The ratings race for both shows comes a week after both took a significant hit because of Game 7 in the World Series. Dynamite managed to pull in 759,000 viewers while NXT dropped to 580,000 viewers for their respective Oct. 30 episodes.

However, AEW still pulled in notably more viewers within the 18-49 demographic than NXT. The Dynamite audience consisted of 450,000 in the demo while NXT had 384,000. This has been a consistent theme with both shows' ratings as viewership is higher in the 18-49 demo for AEW while NXT has higher viewership in the 50-and-older demo.