I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I was thinking about keeping track of the actual Nielsen ratings for wrestling TV programs in addition to tracking my own viewing habits. Here’s why I don’t think I’ll ever do it:

A story last week stated that ECW had the lowest rating in its history (or something similar). Was it that bad of a program? No, the ratings were down because of the presidential election.

I’m trying to measure the quality of the programming. The ratings are not direct measure of quality or how enjoyable the program was to a wrestling fan. The ratings can be/are affected by the enjoyment, but they can also be affected by other factors.

The ratings measure how many people (wrestling fan and non-wrestling fan) decided to watch the programming rather than doing one of a million other possible things they had available to them. They could have decided to watch another program, play a video game, read a book, or believe it or not even go outside.

BTW, “share” is a measure of how many people that decided to watch TV watched a given program. It is a percentage of the total viewers during that time period. A “10” share would mean 10 percent of the people who were watching TV at the time were watching that program.

I’m more interested in what wrestling fans that watched the program thought of it than whether or not the general population watched it.