How Does Impact Wrestling’s Rating On Destination America Compare To ROH Wrestling & Lucha Underground?

Last weeks Impact Wrestling debut on Destination America drew 359,000 viewers for the “two hour tape delay live” special on 1/7. It was main evented by Bobby Lashley defeating Bobby Roode to become TNA World Heavyweight Champion, the show received a mixed reaction from fans. As expected the show was down more than 25% in all demographics and compared to its last original content episode on Spike, it was down approximately 450,000 viewers, so it was down more than half what it would do on Spike, but the show is in half the amount of homes on Destination America. In comparison, Spike’s evening film ‘I Am Number Four’ ran head-to-head with Impact and drew 959,000 viewers.

Compared to other promotions, Impact is still ahead of Lucha Underground, both on El Rey and on the larger Unimas, which gets more viewers for the show than El Rey. The rating for last weeks Lucha Underground featuring Aztec Warfare isn’t in yet but the highest viewership for the show is 34,000 for the December 10th edition. The show has been getting around 200,000 viewers on Unimas.

Impact Wrestling is slightly behind but “in the same ballpark” as Ring of Honor Wrestling, which airs on the Sinclair Broadcasting Group channels across America, and on some non-SBG affiliates like Cox Communications stations and WATL in Atlanta. Ring of Honor Wrestling garners roughly 400,000 viewers per episode, and that is with most of its showing being in worse timeslots than Impact Wrestling, but the advantage it has is ROH is on very strong local stations, like FOX, myTV and ABC affiliates.

Impact Wrestling debuts in its permanent time slot this Friday on Destination America. The shows viewership is expected to decrease further but the hope from Destination America and Impact would be that in a few weeks it will have solidified itself in the Friday night slot.

(Source: Wrestling Observer)