Raw Rating: Did rating go up in the first week without football competition and with Brock advertised? (w/Keller’s Analysis)

The Jan. 16 episode of Monday Night Raw drew a 2.16 rating, the highest Nov. 28 last year. It opened with a strong first hour viewership of 3.519 million, but dropped steeply thereafter down to 3.074 million in the third hour. The first-to-third hour dropoff of 445,000 is the highest since Nov. 7 last year. The ten-week rolling average for the drop-off is 283,000. The second hour drew 3.221 million, so the dropoff was most steep from the first to second hour compared to the second to the third hour.

One year ago, Raw drew a 2.45 rating.

Keller’s Analysis: This begins the post-football season for Monday Night Raw, and this ratings increase is likely to due that, in addition to advertising Brock Lesnar. The bad news is, while they started with nearly 500,000 more viewers in the first hour than the prior ten week average, and more than 500,000 more than last week’s first hour, the third hour drew 162,000 more than the prior ten week average for the third hour. So if viewers were tuning in who normally don’t watch, they weren’t impressed enough to stick around for all three hours. It could also be as simple as feeling that they tuned in to see Brock and got to see him in the first segment, and then decided to tune out thereafter.