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While much of sports media is enjoying the lift from Nielsen’s new audience measurement process, a real-life conflict has emerged in the normally staged world of pro wrestling.
The CW, the Nexstar-controlled outlet that is among several entities showing World Wrestling Entertainment or All Elite Wrestling programming, has taken direct aim at Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel, the enhanced methodology that went into effect Sept. 1.
Since the new process started, a wide variety of leagues and sports have seen viewership boosts, including Major League Baseball, the National Football League, and college football. The CW, however, has seen audience declines of nearly 10% in the last two months, with even sharper declines in key demos, and is speaking out about it.
“The sudden and substantial discrepancy in WWE NXT viewership reported by Big Data, relative to long-established viewing patterns, is inexplicable and lacks credibility,” The CW said in a statement. “A comparison with data from all other measurement products (including others from Nielsen itself) exposes a fundamentally flawed methodology in Big Data. We are disappointed by Nielsen’s lack of cooperation, transparency, and accountability with its network partners as we work to resolve this issue.”
Big Data + Panel, bringing in tens of millions of additional data points from set-top boxes and smart TVs, is designed to capture more accurately viewership that is already occurring—something that particularly benefits sports given the live nature of the competition.
Wrestlenomics, a site focused on the business of pro wrestling, detailed other recent declines in pro wrestling viewership, including on WWE SmackDown on USA Network, AEW Dynamite on TBS, and AEW Collision on TNT. The time period in question since the arrival of Big Data + Panel, however, is the most crowded and competitive in sports during the entire year, with the end of seasons in baseball and golf overlapping with the starts of new ones for football, basketball, and hockey.
Out-of-home measurement, something also expanded this year by Nielsen, typically does not benefit pro wrestling as much as in other sports, given it’s not often first-choice programming at sports bars and other similar communal settings.
Nielsen told Front Office Sports that when applying Big Data + Panel methodology to year-ago numbers for WWE NXT on The CW and comparing them to the recent period, the decline is a “minimal” 5%. Further study into the issue, however, is planned.
Wider Debate
The CW complaint is not the first in sports to be directed at Nielsen since the arrival of Big Data + Panel. Soon after the new process started, NFL officials also complained about their audiences being undercounted in some respects. In particular, NFL chief data and analytics officer Paul Ballew told FOS that “we’re happy with the steps we’ve taken forward for 2025, but there’s more work to be done.”
That issue resonated even more loudly given the NFL’s status as the most-watched programming of any type in all of U.S. television.
Discussion between the NFL and Nielsen on specific measurement-related issues continues, but since that initial outcry, game audiences for the league have risen to an average of 17.7 million. That is up 6% from last year and the best such figure at this point of the season since 2015.
