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One of the big talking points of the last several days has been who would win the AEW Rampage vs. WWE Friday Night Smackdown showdown. So, here's the breakdown:
In overall viewers, it was the 2 1/2 hour Supersized edition of Smackdown, which brought in 866,000 overnight viewers, compared to AEW's 578,000 overnight viewers. Smackdown was third for all of basic cable on Friday, while AEW was fourth. So, if you are going by viewers, Smackdown beat AEW, even with their greatly reduced numbers due to being on a much smaller than usual footprint on FS1.
However, AEW gets some bragging rights as well. Their episode, despite the direct WWE competition for the first 30 minutes Rampage was on the air, was still up to 578,000 overnight viewers, up a bit from last week's 502,000 viewers. It would be interesting to see what the head to head numbers were from 10 PM - 10:30 PM EST as that was the only true "minute to minute" competition.
Smackdown was third for the night. AEW was fourth. They were each beaten by ESPN College Football coverage.
However, in the area that advertisers are most interested in, the 18-49 demo, WWE and AEW were like Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed; they went to a draw. Each side brought in a .024 demo for their respective broadcast and in the case of AEW, they were up from a 0.17 the week before.
If we dig in a little deeper, Smackdown won with females 18-19 as they scored a 0.16 to AEW's 0.14.
Among Males 18-49, AEW won the night with a 0.34 to Smackdown's 0.32.
Among Males 12-34, WWE scored a 0.20 to AEW's 0.16. Among Females in that age bracket, AEW and WWE tied with 0.10 each.
Among People 18-34, AEW scored a 0.17 to Smackdown's 0.15.
Among People 25-54, they each tied at 0.28.
Among People 50+, Smackdown easily won with a 0.43 to 0.21.
So, who won the night? The fans did. There were two really entertaining shows with great wrestling across the board.
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