Interest in Invasion Angle Follow-Up Boosts WWE Smackdown Ratings

[Big Red Machine]

Source: www.F4WOnline.com

Despite competition from game one of the MLB World Series, SmackDown did its best numbers since September 12th for this week's episode. Last night's show had an average audience of 2.699 million viewers, up 16 percent over last week.

The increase in ratings was almost certainly due to curiosity over the SmackDown invasion of Raw the night before, which closed Monday night's show. SmackDown was third for the night on cable in terms of total viewers and second in the 18-49 demo with a 0.81 rating.

Year-over-year, SmackDown was up a whopping 26.89 percent and this week was the seventh biggest audience for the show so far in 2017.

SmackDown also retained over 91 percent of the Raw audience from the night before, one of the highest totals ever. This week's Monday Night Football game was up from previous weeks, so that likely cut into Raw's audience -- but there were certainly people interested in seeing if there would be any follow-up to the invasion angle on SmackDown.

WWE did close the show hinting at a Raw retaliation in coming weeks, so it will be interesting to see if the strong numbers hold up leading into Survivor Series next month.