After six straight weeks of declining viewership, SmackDown rebounded on Tuesday night with a seven percent increase from the previous week and had its biggest audience since the January 2nd episode. The show averaged 2.613 million viewers.
SmackDown finished fourth for the night on cable, much higher than usual, and topped all of cable in the 18-49 demo with a 0.8 rating.
It wasn’t all good news, though, as SmackDown was down year-over-year for the fourth straight week. Conversely, Raw has been up from the previous year the last two Mondays and three of the last five weeks.
The audience retention from the previous night was almost identical to last week, at right around 80 percent. That’s what the show has been doing for most of 2018 after being around 90 percent at the end of last year.
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SmackDown this week opened with an AJ Styles promo and closed with a match between Styles and Baron Corbin that was promoted for the whole show. On average, ratings have increased since Styles won the WWE Championship from Jinder Mahal.