Goldberg's appearance on Raw helps boost this week's ratings

Raw ratings on Monday were up to 3.04 million viewers, an increase of seven percent, likely due to a combination of Bill Goldberg’s appearance keeping the third hour from too much of a decline and slightly easier football competition.

The one notable difference is that the second hour was the highest instead of the first hour. The usual pattern is first hour highest in the winter and second hour in the summer due to daylight savings time. The difference was the first hour and early second hour went against the Rose Bowl game with Penn State vs. USC which did 15.74 million viewers, which is more than almost all NFL games have been doing against Raw.

Much of the second hour and all of the third hour went against the lower-rated Sugar Bowl game with Auburn vs. Oklahoma, which did 9.52 million viewers, which is lower than most NFL games have been doing on Monday.

Last week’s show went against the Cowboys-Lions NFL game that did 18.61 million viewers, the best of the season.

Raw finished 8th for the day on cable, trailing only college football related programming on ESPN, and beating all the news channels, which were way down.

It was the most-watched Raw since the November 28th show headlined by the Charlotte vs. Sasha Banks women’s title match.

Next week, going against the college football championship game, will be the last episode against football until the fall. The traditional bounce-back show should be on January 16th.

The three hours were:

8 p.m. 3.04 million viewers
9 p.m. 3.16 million viewers
10 p.m. 2.94 million viewers

Here’s a chart from Paul Fontaine that looks at the last 10 weeks of Raw ratings compared to the last four years: