The ratings are in for last night's (Jan. 30) episode of WWE Monday Night Raw and -- surprise -- they're up big thanks to it being the Royal Rumble fallout show.
WWE Raw on Monday, January 30 the night after the Royal Rumble PPV scored a 3.55 rating, up 12 percent compared to a 3.18 rating last week leading to the Rumble. It was the highest Raw rating since the night after WrestleMania 27 on April 4 last year, which scored a 3.82 rating.
Raw averaged 5.22 million viewers, up 13 percent compared to last week's Rumble lead-in show. It was the first time Raw cracked five million viewers since October 10 and the most overall viewers since May 23, 2011 for the first Raw after Randy Savage's death. Beyond May 23, it was the most viewers since Edge's retirement announcement on the April 11, 2011 Raw.
Again, this isn't a big shocker considering the fact that the Raw immediately following the Rumble pay-per-view does well every year, for obvious reasons. That's likely why they built to Triple H returning to potentially fire John Laurinaitis only to have Undertaker make his big return as well.
Trips is advertised for next week's show but Undertaker is not, so it's possible 'Taker's appearance was just to maximize exposure for him on a show they knew would do good numbers.
That's also probably why they booked the show the way they did. Ultimately, this was one of the best episodes of Raw in a long time, with Randy Orton having an amazing match with Dolph Ziggler while CM Punk and Daniel Bryan tore the house down before Chris Jericho set up a feud with Punk.
All things considered, this is a win all around.
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