And Ruby Soho is a big star who had been fired from WWE just months earlier. And then the second segment, which was Ruby Soho versus The Bunny, two female wrestlers who fans had been just really mean to and said your segment’s not gonna do well. I had a 30 minute head-to-head window, and I had to do six minutes of commercials. “We beat them in the 18 to 49 pretty cleanly. The reason I’m bringing this up is because Khan spoke about the 30 minute Friday night war during an appearance this week on The Dan LeBatard Show with Stugotz, and he emphasized how happy he was to see Punk beat WWE in the key demo: “Punk did tell Khan not to change anything in the show or the booking as a response (changing the card, as both McMahon does regularly now and both McMahon and Bischoff did constantly in the late 90s against each other) and asked to put him first head-to-head ‘because I can take that bullet.’” WWE did indeed draw the bigger total audience for those 30 minutes, but AEW achieved a higher rating in the key 18 to 49 year old demographic.Ī recent issue of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter included the following tidbit about that head-to-head battle, where CM Punk advised AEW head honcho Tony Khan to put his match (against Matt Sydal) on first against WWE: Dopes like me predicted WWE’s commercial-free half hour would handily outperform AEW in the numbers that night. We got a small bite of that head-to-head apple last month when WWE extended the runtime of SmackDown to overlap the first 30 minutes of Rampage on Oct. AEW Dynamite did send NXT screaming and yelling off Wednesdays earlier this year, but that lopsided war never measured up to WCW Nitro going head-to-head with WWF Raw every single Monday night.

One of the reasons why the current competition between WWE and AEW doesn’t compare to the Monday night ratings war between WWF and WCW from the mid to late 1990’s is because of the lack of head-to-head battles between the two promotions.

We beat all night beyonce