Eric Bischoff Talks AEW Dynamite Potentially Moving To Monday Nights

Former WWE SmackDown Executive Vice President and WCW President Eric Bischoff recently discussed AEW Dynamite and a potential move to Mondays for the show on After 83 Weeks w/Christy Olson.

Bischoff was posed the question on the show, being asked if he felt AEW Dynamite could eventually make a move to Monday Nights and go head-to-head with WWE RAW. The reasoning behind the question was because Monday is regarded by ‘casual’ fans as ‘wrestling night’ and AEW could potentially capitalise on that audience.

TNA made the move to Monday nights back in 2010, eventually moving back to their usual time slot later in the week. Bischoff has previously said that the reason for that move was to get fans to ‘sample’ the product, but he doesn’t think that AEW should be moving anytime soon.

“If I were there, and I had a voice in the room? I would probably be suggesting that they stay away from Mondays until their numbers start coming up every week,” Bischoff began.

“What we’ve seen, when they debuted they came in about 1.4 to 1.5 million viewers. And pre COVID? They were hovering in that eight or 900,000 viewers category,” he continued. “That means they went from here, to here, to here (motioning downwards). And now they’re kind of flatlining at almost 35 or 40% of their premiere audience.”

Bischoff then compared AEW Dynamite’s viewership trends to that of WCW Nitro.

“If you go back and you look at Nitro’s performance when we launched? That was September I guess in ’95? We started out in the low twos or mid twos, and we crept up to the high twos. Then we crept up to a three and then we crept up to a three three over a pretty long period of time. It didn’t happen overnight, It took a while.”

Eric Bischoff elaborated further, saying “But most importantly? If you looked at our ratings as a graph over the first year? It would be a slow but steady build up. What we’ve seen with AEW has been a slow but steady deterioration of the audience they seemed to have, pre-COVID. That’s now leveling out at about that 800,000 Mark 850,000 whatever it is.”

Bischoff finished by giving his own take on when AEW could even begin to consider moving their night to compete with a bigger WWE platform than they currently are with NXT on Wednesdays.

“That’s the risk, if the audience isn’t so into your product and you make a move to another night? They may or may not come with you. But if you can demonstrate by growing that audience and watching other indicators like licensing and merchandising and pay per view numbers? If you can say to yourself ‘okay for the last six months we’ve increased viewers by X percent. We’ve increased merchandise sales by X percent.’ When you can start filling in those blanks in, and it indicates an upward trend? Then I would start having a conversation about Monday nights.”