Do ratings matter to IMPACT Wrestling? Find out below.
Over the past few years on Fridays around 4 PM EST, the ratings for Thursdays episode of IMPACT Wrestling would be posted onto 'ShowBuzzDaily' and a number of wrestling media sites including Fightful pick up on those ratings and report them but also doing some reporting is IMPACT Wrestling commentator Josh Matthews. When the ratings are released Matthews immediately grabs the information and sends it over to his colleagues and the higher ups in IMPACT.
Josh Matthews shared that piece of information when he joined the 'Notsam Wrestling' podcast this past November and spoke at length about IMPACT's TV ratings and if they truly matter to the company or not. IMPACT has been at the 10 PM EST slot on Pop TV since late October of 2018 and starting this Friday they'll be beginning their new tenure on the Pursuit Channel at the 10 PM EST slot. The ratings for the show will have many of eyes on it because of the position that IMPACT is in and below is what Josh Matthews thinks of ratings and the importance of them:
“Ok so I have to say this with a caveat, I am the first person that knows the rating for our overnight and I send it to everybody on Friday at exactly 4:45 when it comes out on ShowBuzzDaily and I’m refreshing until they put the top 150 out, and the Thanksgiving numbers were delayed until today and I was on there at 8:30 waiting for the numbers and we did a 124 on Thanksgiving which is up from the previous week. But with that said, yeah, next week we’ll do a 102 -- like it’s so… you can’t predict that number and for us it’s like, because it’s that number right? That’s like if two people don’t watch the show that week, it’s going to affect it enormously. So, with that caveat being said, it’s not that important because the plus three, the plus five, plus seven. The President of Pop TV Brad Schwartz said that he wish he can get a plus 30 which they don’t obviously do but if you can look at the plus seven numbers and the weekend numbers especially for a show that’s on Thursday, that speaks more to who’s watching the show obviously than your overnights, but I think we’re just stuck in that weird Monday Night Wars world where the overnight was such a big deal but it’s not really and then the most important number is the key demo." Matthews explained. "I know what our key demo was for Thanksgiving and I’m not gonna say it because it was low, but that number was disappointing and lower than normally where we are. We’re normally around point eight, point seven and that’s okay, you don’t want to get overwhelmed one point whatever, but that’s the most important number -- that key demo and so the overnights, not a huge deal, but, we all look for it, we all wait for it, we all discuss it, we all debate[d] it when we got up over five hundred thousand earlier this year, the debate was raging on as to how we did it and again, being so close to these things now, I know that right now the numbers aren’t gonna be great, but March and April and May, the numbers are going to be super inflated because it’s WrestleMania season and the numbers will be inflated across the board for all wrestling and not only TV ratings but for digital numbers -- like April and May are going to amaze people." He said. "Like if you came on board in April or May, ‘Oh my God, look at how great this is. What an uptick’ and then summer comes around and you’re like, ‘Oh, wait, what’s happening? What’s going on?’ You have to look at it like it’s a rollercoaster. Those months are gonna be up and then the summer months are going to go down.”
Tonight is IMPACT Wrestling's 'Homecoming' pay-per-view and Fightful will have live coverage and a review of the show once it concludes.
If the quote in this article is used, please credit the 'Notsam Wrestling' podcast with an H/T to Fightful for the transcription.
