Image: WWE
Men’s Royal Rumble winner Edge, making his third appearance on WWE television this week did not seem to mean anything to the SmackDown audience on Friday night. The episode averaged 2.126 million viewers on national fast, a 4.6 percent drop from last night’s number of the homecoming program Royal Rumble last week.
SmackDown’s audience was consistent throughout the program, falling 1.7 percent from the first to the second hour. The episode had an average of 2.144 million viewers in the first hour and 2.108 million viewers in the second hour.
Fox finished last among the top networks in terms of total viewers, with NBC’s average of 2.9 million viewers getting closer. SmackDown got a rating of 0.6 on the 18-49 demo, which is the same overnight number as it had in the past three weeks. SmackDown came in second in network programming in 18-49, behind ABC’s Shark Tank.
Demo 18-34 was also the same with a rating of 0.3. This was behind Shark Tank and was tied for second in the nets.
All the major networks showcased the original first-run programming, so that was probably the reason for SmackDown’s smallest audience.
Year after year, SmackDown fell 16.5% in audience, 20% in 18-49 and 33.3% in 18-34.
Here’s a look at SmackDown’s last 10 weeks of night viewing (note: the December 18th episode aired on FS1):
