Tonight is the last night of the "Wednesday Night War". Since October 2, 2019 through today, AEW Dynamite on TNT and WWE NXT on the USA Network competed head-to-head on 75 Wednesday nights. NXT moves to Tuesday next week.

I'll tweet some facts and maybe thoughts here...

As of last week, AEW led NXT in total viewers on 63 of 74 head-to-head Wednesdays.

NXT led 9 times: 11/20/2019, 11/27/2019, 12/18/2019, 4/8/2020, 4/15/2020, 6/24/2020, 7/1/2020, 7/8/2020, and 10/28/2020.

The shows tied to the nearest thousand twice: 12/11/2019 and 11/25/2020.

The P18-49 viewership demographic, an important measurement to advertisers, was the subject of much consternation among fans and pundits as the competition went on.

In that category, AEW led on 73 of the 74 nights.

NXT led with adults aged 18 to 49 just once, on 12/19/2019.

On the P2+ (total viewers) vs. P18-49 subject, Turner and therefore AEW are far more concerned with P18-49 than P2+. Advertisers never buy based on P2+; they buy based on demos.

It's not clear to me WWE or NBCU, Fox or other networks view it the same way.

WWE TV deals were made after including P2+ as well as P18-49 data in their pitches.

Younger viewers are more desirable, but all cable viewers are in a home with a cable subscription. And cable networks make the majority of their revenue from carriage fees supports by those subs.

With that out of the way, AEW dominated with younger viewers. NXT dominated with viewers age 50 and over.

"Unknown" cells appear in these tables for some weeks because Showbuzzdaily reported limited demos for NXT when it didn't finish among the top 50 cable originals in P18-49.

And then there were quarter-hour numbers, first reported weekly by the Wrestling Observer Newsletter (or on very rare occasion, Wrestlenomics/me).

Here's how total viewership by quarter-hour sorted out.

AEW leads in grey, NXT leads in yellow.

That was P2+. NXT led in 110 of 592 (19%) quarter-hours in total viewers. AEW led 480 (81%). There also 2 ties.

This is P18-49. NXT led in that category in just 13 of 592 (2%) quarters. AEW led the other 579 (98%).

It's tempting to look to these quarter-hour data to make sense of which stars are big attractions to viewers and which are not.

More than any star, viewership correlated to *time*.

The first 15 minutes, at least partly due to lead-ins, was often the most viewed quarter.

Quarter-hour viewership analysis is also compromised by needing to account for, not just time placement, but also commercial breaks. Quarters consisting of matches also tend to perform better than video packages or other pre-taped segments.

Minute-by-minute data is tracked by both companies. Datasets of entire shows for either AEW or NXT have never been reported. AEW VP Chris Harrington (creator of Wrestlenomics) did a screen share with me in December of one night of minute-by-minute data.