Wrestling Fans Who Love Ratings Talk Rejoice: ShowBuzzDaily Is Back
Photo Credit: WWE
ShowBuzzDaily is back from the grave.
ShowBuzzDaily posted the following update (appropriately titled “We’re As Surprised As You Are”), revealing they are up and running again after taking an extended hiatus due to a major technical issue. The site initially shut down in May (and it looked like it was for good), but site owners Mitch Salem and Mitch Metcalf are officially rebooting the site, with some outlined changes.
From ShowBuzzDaily:
When ShowbuzzDaily stopped operating in May, we thought the site was gone for good. We were unable even to enter the site to find out why it was locked, and our attempts to get technical assistance hit a variety of digital cement walls. However, we’re delighted to report that with a little help, we were able to get the site back into service.
For the most part, ShowbuzzDaily will be as it was before, but there will be a few changes:
The biggest is that we’ve made the decision to no longer post morning preliminary broadcast network ratings. That’s not connected to our technical difficulties, we just feel like those numbers, which are available only to the tenth of a rating point, have increasingly little meaning when broadcast 18-49 ratings are now almost entirely within a narrow range, roughly 0.5-1.0. In addition, Nielsen had already adopted a policy of not reporting preliminary ratings for major live events like sports and awards programming. And of course the preliminary ratings for Monday-Thursday are superseded by finals a few hours later anyway. We will continue to post broadcast finals and cable ratings on our traditional schedule.
We’re increasing our coverage of news programming with a daily chart that includes both broadcast and cable daily ratings.
Other changes include a shift of the comments section moving to Disqus, along with fixing a recurring issue related to a daily headlines email. It was noted that requests for data between May-August 2021 won’t be able to be posted, but ShowBuzzDaily also teased some more exciting changes that will be announced in the future.
The ShowBuzzDaily ratings post on May 5th determined All Elite Wrestling finished #1 overall on the night for the “Blood & Guts” episode of AEW Dynamite. The “final” post (until now) on ShowBuzzDaily was the Tuesday, May 11 ratings, which included NXT viewership for that night.
In the interim, sites like WrestleNomics have stepped in to provide fans and journalists with comprehensive wrestling television viewership figures through its Patreon account.