What AEW Dynamite Quarter-Hour Ratings Reveal About Jamie Hayter-Hikaru Shida Main Event

For the first time since March 16's "St. Patrick's Day Slam" edition of "AEW Dynamite" where Thunder Rosa dethroned Britt Baker, AEW headlined its flagship show with the company's women's championship on the line (coincidentally, both shows were held at the Freeman Coliseum in San Antonio, Texas). With this departure from the typical format of AEW programming, a big question was going to be what effect the Jamie Hayter title defense versus Hikaru Shida had on the Nielsen ratings. particularly with the female demographics reported earlier being up slightly for the episode.

The answer? It wasn't much of a factor in either direction.

On Thursday evening, Brandon Thurston reported the quarter-hour numbers on his Wrestlenomics Patreon page, and though the December 21 edition of "Dynamite" showed the usual pattern of losing viewers throughout the show, a deeper look shows that the reason was likely the overall trend and not the main event. Q7 and Q8, the quarters featuring the main event, drew 873,000 and 869,000 total viewers respectively in the main P2+ demographic, with the same quarters respectively drawing 365,000 and 328,000 viewers in the key P18-49 demo. Compared to the trend across the previous four weeks, there was no gain or loss in P2+, while Q7 and Q8 respectively saw gains of three percent and one percent above the trend line.

From quarter-hour to quarter-hour across the body of the show, only Q5, featuring Jon Moxley versus Darius Martin increased over the previous quarter, a slight bump from 950,000 to 952,000. In the key demo, Q3 (+5,000) and Q4 (+4,000) both gained a few thousand viewers quarter to quarter, with those segments mainly consisting of angles, promos, the conclusion of the match between The Elite and Death Triangle, HOOK's squash match, and Jon Moxley's entrance.