In an interview with Yahoo! Finance, AEW President Tony Khan made some bold claims about the how AEW has grown in 2025.
Speaking to Brian Sozzi, Kahn said: “We’re having a really, really great year. It feels like 2025 is, in a lot of ways, the best year we’ve had…We’re doing fantastic. This was a huge year for us. We grew the business so much with the simulcast. We brought in new audience with Max and streaming but also we’ve been able to grow our cable audience year-over-year. A lot of people thought when you start simulcasting AEW on Wednesday nights and Saturday nights a lot of people they’re still going to watch the show but people are going to migrate to streaming. Well, actually, our cable audience when we started simulcasting went up and we have a great audience on Max streaming every week too. So we have been able to do that, and we’ve really maintained and grown a great audience over the years.”
The actual AEW ratings tell a completely different story.
Khan’s claim that AEW has “grown our cable audience year-over-year” is not accurate, misleading when we examine the actual cable viewership numbers for Dynamite and Collision in 2024 versus 2025.
In a year-to-year comparison, Dynamite ratings are down 15%.
In a year-to-year comparison, Collision’s ratings are down 15–18% year to year.
There’s no evidence of “cable growth year-over-year.”
As far as Khan’s statement: “Our cable audience went up when we started simulcasting…”
Both shows have seen month-over-month gains on cable since January 2025. Dynamite has climbed 5 to 6% since January and Collision has seen an impressive gain of 23%.
Khan’s statement that there is a “great audience on Max” cannot be verified because no public data has ever been made available for Max streaming viewership. Slam Wrestling has reached out to Max representatives and has never been given AEW Max viewership statistics.
Khan’s claim of “We’ve maintained a great audience over the years” is technically true in the sense that key events still draw strong numbers but it’s misleading if interpreted as stable or growing overall performance.
Dynamite’s peak era was 2021–2022 during which episodes brought in 800,000 to 1 million viewers on cable.
In 2023, the audience began to decline to an average of 830,000 to 900,000 with several weeks under 800,000.
2024’s average was about 800,000 to 850,000. The viewership declined in the later part of the year down to 682,000 on December 25.
In 2025, the range is mostly 588,000 t0 736,000, with regular weeks showing 600,000 to 800,000.
In 2023, Collison began at 400,000 to 700,000 and then fluctuated from 350,000 to 600,000 but by 2024 episodes dropped to 300,000 to 4000,00 a week. In 2025 there has been some recovery with the average being 345,000 to 504,000.
So, even though AEW still commands a significant core cable audience and steady weekly viewership and event-driven spikes both shows are trending much lower than their peak years with Dynamite being down 30 to 40% and Collision down approximately 23.90% since their initial debuts.
