Final Deletion Gives TNA Impact Highest Viewership In Over A Year, Squandered YouTube Views

Tuesday's episode of TNA Impact, featuring The Final Deletion was the most-watched episode in the program's run on Pop TV. You'd have to go back to May 29, 2015, just before Destination America moved its timeslot, to find an episode of Impact that had higher first-run viewership.

It'll be interesting to see next week whether Impact can retain much of this spike in viewership, whether the viewership will return to normal, or whether it can continue to gain momentum.

Impact's average viewership in the PopTV run (295,777) is now slightly higher than its average viewership when the program was on Wednesday nights on Destination America (287,414), but it's still lower than the overall average for when the program was on DA (330,500).

It also appears TNA squandered about 500,000 video views by not posting video of the Final Deletion online immediately after it aired on Pop. As of this morning there are still three videos of the match on YouTube from accounts other than TNA's own official account. These have a total of 486,208 views and counting. The most viewed clip of the match on Dailymotion has about 15,400 views. These videos were all posted Tuesday night or Wednesday. TNA's official account only uploaded the video Thursday.

Based on a formula used to estimate YouTube ad revenue, 500,000 views could be worth between $500 and $1000, which may not be huge money, but you'd think a company in financial distress like TNA needs all the revenue it can get.

Viewership data referenced in this article was collected variously from Showbuzzdaily.com, PWTorch.com and the Wrestling Observer Newsletter.