AEW President Tony Khan spoke with Ariel Helwani about the viewership performance for Blood & Guts 2025, revealing that the episode delivered one of AEW’s strongest ratings in months. Khan praised both the live cable audience and AEW’s growing streaming viewership on HBO Max.
“I’m very excited. We’re coming off of an awesome event this past week and awesome ratings. We had a great week. We were one of the top shows on cable,” Khan said. When asked what the show drew, he explained, “I don’t have all the numbers of the DVR and I don’t know the streaming numbers. You got to remember that we have a lot of fans who watch on HBO Max now, but on TBS, it was 600,000 and it was in our time slot one of the top shows and it ranked somewhere in the top 10 on cable for the entire night. And in its time slot, I think it was along with ESPN and Fox News. TBS was one of the top three channels.”
Khan added that, based on the cable performance, Blood & Guts 2025 likely outperformed last year’s edition when streaming is factored in. “And it was also to me, if you add in what I would believe we have on our streaming audience, more people watching than last year’s Blood & Guts.”
Helwani asked if AEW receives actual streaming totals, and Khan clarified, “No, I don’t have them. They don’t tell you. No, I don’t have them. And I honestly don’t know how many people would have watched, but knowing that it was our most watched show in months on TBS, I would expect it was probably our most watched show in months on streaming.”
Khan admitted he was expecting a dip in the cable audience as more fans shift to HBO Max, but instead saw the opposite. “I was prepared for a possibility that there could be some erosion or cannibalization of the cable audience which did not happen. It came out the other way in Q1, Q2 and Q3. If you look, our share went up and our total audience went up. So we have this really great success story.”
He explained that recent changes to the Nielsen ratings system have made Q4 numbers unpredictable, which made the strong showing even more meaningful. “There’s been this big change in the Nielsen system. Which is why it was great to see this huge number we did last week for us because it was like well that’s the best number we’ve done since the change and so clearly there was a great response to it. But also Collision the previous Saturday had done the best number it had done since the change in this system so we’re seeing good response.”
Khan said AEW’s current performance relative to WWE’s programming is one of the strongest stretches in company history. “We’ve really closed the gap. It’s kind of like in the pandemic, if you look at where AEW is as a percentage of the WWE shows, this is really one of our strongest runs and if you look at where WWE is, say the audience of Dynamite compared to SmackDown for example or RAW, this is a great time for us. And you would say that along with some of the peak times in AEW, the AEW audience as a percentage of the competition is about as good as it’s ever been and with the streaming audience.”
