Royal Rumble fallout shrinks SmackDown’s audience

Edge’s Royal Rumble win was a hit with WWE diehards, but it hasn’t translated to getting more viewers for WWE.

After a small bump for the Feb. 1 Raw and a dip for NXT two days later, SmackDown’s audience also shrank on Feb. 5 with the Rated R Superstar as the main promoted Superstar. Viewers were down 4.5% from the prior week’s next day numbers, to an average of 2.13 million over the show’s two hours.

Ratings were steady in the key demos at least. That helped FOX finish in a second tie with ABC’s 20/20, behind that Disney-owned Network’s Shark Tank.

Here are the fast nationals:

Showbuzz Daily

And here’s our running tracker of overnight numbers for the current season. You can also access the tab of year one numbers here (all data still via Showbuzz Daily).

Overall, this is more evidence of what we talked about last week: 2+ million viewers and .6 in the under 50 demo is SmackDown’s level. Still, there had to be some hope that a crowd-pleasing edition of one of the company’s most popular events would cause an upswing.

What that means for the rest of the Road to WrestleMania 37? We shall see.

For complete results and the live blog for SmackDown this week click here. To read a review of the night’s events click here. For a full playlist of the show click here.