It appears that the WWE has done away with the split-brand concept, with them having some on the Raw roster appear on Smackdown and vice versa. Now, I’m going to play devil’s advocate (well, sort of devil’s advocate) for keeping the Split-Brand concept. It seems that one of the main reasons for combining the two shows, which I collectively call the “Rawkdown” is to get better ratings for Smackdown. Now the fact is the hottest draws will always be on Raw and they will always be on Raw because that’s the WWE’s bread and butter. The hot draws that are thrown to Smackdown are there for the reason is to help the shows ratings, but in turn, it’s to free up space on the Raw Roster to continue hyping the main wrestler Vince wants to center his company around. That is perfectly understandable. If Raw ratings go down, then the business will go down. Because of this, Smackdown will always be the inferior show.
Now if combining the shows is due to ratings, we must take the other factors into account which is why they are low. First of all, Smackdown is on the Sy-Fy channel. Over all, the Sy-Fy channel does not have the same ratings as the USA channel. So, comparing the RAW ratings versus the Smackdown ratings isn’t really fair because they both are aired on two different channels.
