According to Deadline.com, last week’s debut episode of WWE Monday Night RAW on Netflix drew 5.9M viewers and not the initially reported 4.9M total viewers or 2.6M households on the same day per the data from VideoAmp.
Netflix counts viewership by taking the total number of hours watched (17.7 million) and dividing it by the show’s runtime (three hours). Thus, people who watch just a minute or even an hour of the show are not counted as full viewers; they are folded into the overall duration watched and factored into the math to determine the number of views.
5.9 million views is far above what the show ever drew on USA Network, and in fact, would be more viewers than any episode in the last 10 years. However, there are several reasons why they aren’t comparable. For one, this is viewing spread across the week, and the ratings numbers on terrestrial cable networks were always live or live and same day viewing. In addition, those numbers were provided by Nielsen, which provides representative viewing numbers. And finally, the numbers represent global viewership, whereas the numbers we have received until now have been for US viewing.
The report states, “Notably, the Netflix debut of WWE’s Monday Night RAW drew 5.9M views, which was good enough for fourth place. Last week, the streamer said that the event saw 2.6M households tune in same-day, per data from VideoAmp, but it’s not possible to compare that to Netflix’s internal data. It’s also difficult to compare this to RAW‘s performance on USA Network, since any viewership data on that front came from Nielsen. The best way to get a pulse on any sort of success at this point will be to watch how RAW continues to perform on Netflix week-over-week.”
