Shocker- Nobody Watches The 3rd Hour Of Raw And It's About Time They Got Rid Of It

Wow. Raw ratings are already pretty low. They get a little over 3 million live viewers/week on average. They claim it’s ok that ratings are low because people consume a lot via YouTube, Hulu, and the like, but ratings are ratings are ratings, and Raw’s aren’t very spectacular right now. But the biggest takeaway is the fact they lost 587,000 viewers for the last hour. That the least amount of people are tuning in for the main event, which often doesn’t end til 5-10 minutes past 11pm. And this should be shocking to absolutely nobody. I’ve been saying for years how Raw needs to go back to being a 2 hour show. No other television show on this planet needs 3 hours to tell a story. It burns out the viewers, and most of all, waters down the product. The writers aren’t good enough to give us a compelling product week in and week out, nevermind filling 3 hours of Raw and 2 hours of Smackdown.

For the most part, Raw has been as formulaic as possible for quite a while. No real big twists, save for once or twice every couple of months. The show is so long the action feels few and far between, and the in-arena crowd grows tired. You get there around 7 or so, and the show goes until past 11. That’s a long, long time to give your attention to, with commercials stopping the action the entire night.

Yes, a 3 hour show means more commercials which means more money. Or does it? Put on an incredible 2 hour show week in and week out, get a boost in ratings, be able to charge more for ads because ratings are higher, sell more merch because more eyeballs are on the show, and voila, you solved the 3rd hour revenue issue. It doesn’t seem that difficult. When was wrestling the best? When the show was 2 hours of action.

When wrestling is good, it can be really good. AJ Styles turning on John Cena 2 weeks ago was really good. But then they followed it up this last Monday night with a very poor show. It’s time to get rid of that 3rd hour and make Raw great again.

PS: Bold prediction: John Cena is winning the MITB match. But he’s not in it? Doesn’t matter. He’ll get in it. I want Owens to win it, but wouldn’t be shocked if Cena does.