Hanley! wrote:SlightlyJames wrote:Why this ended the show rather than Reigns vs Cesaro, I don't know.
Oh that's actually pretty obvious. It's not because they thought this was a hugely important angle. It's actually the complete opposite. WWE's ratings have been tanking lately, but particularly that third hour. They dropped well under 3 million viewers during the final hour of last week's Raw, which is a big deal. Apparently their response is to move the important stuff out of the last hour, rather than actually promoting something for the last hour that people might want to see.
I feel like it's important to point out that the Reigns/Cesaro match almost entirely took place during the last hour. It started at 9:59 pm and carried into around 10:20. It was an effort to keep people engaged in the last hour. If people have been switching off at 10 pm then having a match that they really wanted to see, if they really wanted to see it, start at 10:40 still means that they are switching away at 10 pm and maybe coming back if they remember to at a quarter to 11. Front loading the first part of the last hour has a better chance of getting people to stay with you for the entire last hour because if they stayed to watch the Reigns-Cesaro match instead of switching to whatever they were going to watch at 10, then whatever they were going to switch to is half over by the time the match is over and you got a chance to make them say I should ride this out the rest of the way.
