No, AEW Collision on July 6 did not do a zero rating in 18-34
No, not even in the fast nationals!
One of the dumbest ongoing controversies in pro wrestling news in recent years involves the semi-regular leaking of “fast national” Nielsen ratings of AEW’s weekend programming by a party widely understood to be WWE. In broadcast network television, fast nationals are one of three different early measurements (along with overnight metered market ratings and fast affiliate ratings) that are widely available, but in cable? Not so much. For cable fast nationals, not only does a Nielsen subscriber have to pay thousands of dollars per week to request fast nationals for a given TV show, but the numbers aren’t even compiled until a subscriber makes that request. They’re early, incomplete numbers without the west coast factored in, and with most cable ratings available the next afternoon, kind of pointless most of the time.
The fast nationals dialogue started in late 2021, when a bunch of notable wrestling media figures at large websites started reporting them for AEW Rampage around the time that show’s ratings took a big hit. Before long, though, a pattern started emerging: The numbers were only coming out when the audience for Rampage was down week over week. Before long, most of the media publishing them stopped. Why? Because as Fightful’s Sean Ross Sapp has admitted on multiple occasions, the numbers were coming from WWE and the attempted manipulation had become too obvious to ignore. There’s nothing inherently wrong with getting something like Nielsen data about one promotion from someone at the rival promotion…as long as they’re not selectively releasing the numbers. Even the selective release wouldn’t be as bad if the numbers were at least credited to WWE public relations. It also doesn’t help that the fast nationals are generally lower than the final numbers but are usually compared to the prior week’s final number. But that’s WWE’s point: Being first with less flattering numbers a good two days before the final numbers are out.
Anyway, once the dust cleared, Forbes Contributor Network blogger Alfred Konuwa was the only one publishing the AEW fast nationals (for Rampage and later Collision) regularly, with others occasionally mixed in. With Konowa only tweeting the numbers, never writing about them on Forbes.com, it created the bizarre scenario where WWE was spending thousands of dollars each week to do little more than troll AEW on Twitter. It became more of a story in June when, one week, the Collision fast nationals were clearly way too low to be right even by their own standard. The big question became whether or not whoever at WWE sent out the numbers knew they were almost surely a mistake. (The prevailing belief is that the fast nationals measured the wrong time slot from when Collision was supposed to be moved around that week, which ended up not being necessary.) However, this week, we ended up with a more black and white problem: WWE ostensibly providing a Collision number that’s objectively not accurate, even for what’s understood of fast nationals.
This time, it was Bleacher Report’s Erik Beaston who received the honor of being picked by WWE to be its vessel. Being opposite WWE Money in the Bank, nobody expected a good number, and the numbers that Beaston tweeted (citing “sources”) was, indeed, not good. He provided the expected low fast nationals viewership for the P2+ (“total viewers”), P18-49 (“key demo”), and P18-34 demographics, plus ratings percentages for the latter two. However, Beaston specifically highlighted that Collision did a zero rating in in P18-34, and that’s not remotely true. Nielsen is explicit on its website that “A rating of zero means that no homes in the panel tuned in,” which is absolutely not what happened. Per Beaston, the fast nationals had Collision averaging 21,000 viewers in P18-34, which is obviously indicative of homes in the Nielsen sample tuning in.
Based on the most current available data, there are roughly 70,820,000 people in P18-34 demo in the United States, 21,000 divided by 70,820,000 equals 0.00029652640497, or approximately 0.029%. Rounded to the nearest hundredths place as you do with Nielsen ratings, that’s a 0.03% rating, not anything that would be reported as a zero rating. Just because you can round down to 0.0 in mathematical terms doesn’t mean that’s how Nielsen handles its ratings. If someone in the sample watched, it’s not a zero rating. Besides Nielsen’s very clear wording I mentioned earlier, this is also obvious if you look at something like one of ShowBuzzDaily’s old daily ratings posts or one of the more recent SpoilerTV daily ratings posts that list the day’s top 150 cable originals. Those lists routinely include shows under 0.05 in the key demo, but they’re not rounded down to zero. They’re rounded to the hundredths place because, again, anything tracked by Nielsen where someone in the sample is registered as a viewer cannot be logged as a zero rating. Zero ratings are reserved for the most obscure possible programming on the most obscure possible cable channels and local stations, not anything like a live prime time wrestling show on a network the size of TNT. Even then, Nielsen has tried to improve its processes to make them as rare as possible.
I messaged Beaston on Instagram (his only publicly available account for messaging him) for comment and, as of the writing, I haven’t heard back. Obviously, the thing I most want to know is if he’s aware of the falsehood and willing to correct it, but that’s not the only thing I want to know. I’d love confirmation of what is fairly obvious but hasn’t been confirmed: That the content of the tweets besides the raw viewership numbers are also provided by WWE. It’s always been the assumption with the constant disingenuous comparisons of the fast nationals to the previous week’s final numbers, so it stands to reason that WWE also fed Beaston the claim that the July 6 Collision drew a zero in P18-34.
Funny thing about that, by the way: In the same tweet, Beaston also rounded the P18-49 rating to the tenths place, saying Collision did a 0.1. However, based on the 93,000 viewers figure he gave for that demo and there being 131,880,000 people in that demo in the country, the correct number would be a 0.07 in P18-49. This is not the first time that an AEW weekend show has done under a 0.10 of late, so it should be obvious from recent ratings posts, like at Wrestlenomics, that nobody represents the ratings by rounding to the tenths digit. As a result, it looks like Beaston or whoever provided him with the numbers inflated the P18-49 fast national rating for the July 6 Collision solely to be able to falsely claim that the P18-34 rating that night was a zero.
Look, let’s be very clear about what I said up front: This is all incredibly stupid. Deeply, profoundly stupid. No outlet of note is covering these fast nationals, much less any sports business or television trade publications that anyone in the TV industry would be getting their news from. Warner Bros. Discovery and any other broadcasters that AEW might be negotiating with are going to be going by the real, final, properly contextualized Nielsen ratings to figure out what kind of deal they might offer the promotion. None of this is likely to have any direct effect on AEW’s business, at least not in the board room sense.
Instead, once most wrestling media stopped playing along, and especially with the more outright suspect numbers of recent weeks, the goal appears to be for WWE to buoy the narrative of AEW being a dying or failing company. And while AEW has seen noticeable dips in live attendance and Nielsen ratings of late, WWE started doing this in late 2021, arguably the peak of AEW’s popularity. This has been a long-term plan to chip away at AEW on social media to make it seem particularly unpopular and/or uncool at a grassroots level among the most online subset of wrestling fans. The scary thing is that it’s starting to feel like it might actually have succeeded. Not just because it’s working, but because it should have been nipped in the bud in 2021, but some people decided that they’d rather do WWE’s bidding so they could tell their friends they got picked by The Worldwide Leader in Sports Entertainment.
UPDATE: According to Brandon Thurston at Wrestlenomics, the final number in P18-34 was 32,000 viewers, a whopping 52.3% increase from the fast nationals. 32,000 / 70,820,000 = 0.000451849759955, or a 0.045% rating. Rounded to the hundredths place as is standard in Nielsen ratings, and that’s a 0.05% rating, meaning that even in basic mathematical terms (not what Nielsen counts as zero), the final number could not be rounded to zero if rounding to the tenths place. So not only was the WWE-fed claim of a zero rating in that demo a blatant lie, but it also retroactively became even more of a lie. We don’t usually get P18-34 numbers when WWE leaks fast nationals, so we can’t compare past fluctuations to determine how obvious it might have been to them that the final number would have been this much higher. Realistically, though, since the releasing the P18-34 number is an outlier and their pattern has been to be as deceptive as possible, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to conclude that they knew.