(WON) WWE has been ordering AEW fast nationals every week roughly since Nick Khan started. WWE PR also tried to feed the numbers to a long line of reporters who long ago decided it was too shady.

(Also confirmed by SRS)

Context: Fast Nationals are the initial, immediate Nielsen ratings numbers that come in right after a show airs. Why they matter here is that they are always significantly lower than what the final average Nielsen rating ends up being once all the numbers are tallied and calculated. WWE buys the fast national information, which costs thousands of dollars per-episode, and pushes them out to friendly “reporters” and social media pundits in order to create a narrative that AEW programming isn’t watched by a lot of people. Most recently, this happened with an episode of Collision from a few weeks ago, which did a fast national number of like 122,000 average viewers, and then come Monday the real rating was published and it ended up being within Collision’s normal average rating, which is closer to 400,000. However, the damage had been done, as the entire weekend people on social media were loudly proclaiming that Collision did a terrible number and AEW was “in the mud” as a result.

A little more context from WON:

"Brandon Thurston noted just how almost impossible it is to get fast nationals on cable shows. Fast nationals on network shows that come out that next morning, while not as easily available as in the past, are still out there but for cable, that information is almost non-existent. Fast nationals access is highly exclusive. Cable fast nationals are not available to any run of the mill Nielsen customer who may be a source (unlike final ratings and unlike broadcast fast affiliates which are more broadly available and give an early look at Smackdown). Cable fast nationals must be requested and purchased for thousands of dollars for each episode. So the possible sources are far fewer than for typical ratings reporting. And I know WWE has been ordering AEW fast nationals every week roughly since Nick (Khan) started. Plus I know WWE PR tried to feed the numbers to a long line of reporters who long ago decided it was too shady."