Sun
2-Oct-2019(#1)Other thread was closed...so here we are.
Anyone else excited for AEW Dynamite tonight?
theJaw
10-Mar(#83)BucketofJustice wrote:> He’s a big star. In Japan. I don’t think he will move the needle 4.5 million
> dollars worth here in the US. At least not yet. I do think wrestlers should be paid
> way more, but the return on investment for Okada isn’t there yet.
After one week and a single squash match, of course it's not there yet. He'll at least help retain the audience they already have, which is already enough to satisfy the network they need to satisfy.
That term "needle mover" needs to be retired haha. Didn't Roman Reigns say it in a promo and then suddenly everyone started saying it? To be fair, sometimes it's not about moving a needle and more about keeping a product fresh. If the needle doesn't necessarily
need to move, then the latter is more important.
> I hope it gets
> there for AEW’s sake, because more money is good for everyone and theoretically
> should yield a better product for everyone.
This is exactly how I feel too. Hopefully it pans out to be good for everyone -- including folks outside AEW and for other promotions in general.
PizzaTheHutt
10-Mar(#85)For the needle mover phrase, that was just Roman being a company man, like Jericho is now, just say what you think is expected of you to please whoever is signing your checks.
I think Roman said it in an interview when asked what he thought about CM Punk going to AEW. In CM Punk's defense, he did move the needle quite a bit for AEW, and since he left they've still not quite recovered. But you know how it goes, asking someone in one company what they think of something going on in the other company, of course they usually won't give proper credit when due. Roman wouldn't say that now that CM Punk is back in WWE, unless it was planned to lead up to a storyline down the road. Just like I'm sure Batista would only have good things to say about AJ Styles now that he's in WWE, compared to 20 years ago when he was in TNA and Batista had nothing good to say about him in interviews.
As for fans criticizing a company's ratings or ticket sales, I don't see why it's a problem, it's harmless unless it gets to the point where the conversation turns toxic. I'm not a sports fan but what I've learned from people who are is that the fans (conveniently of the losing team) always know what the right play to call is better than that good-fer-nothin' coach does. Or compared to other scripted shows, I'm not a Game of Thrones fan but everyone who was seemed to know how that series could've ended better than the writers it did.
I don't dare say I know how to drive up ticket sales more than Tony knows, but I'd start with maybe smaller venues depending on what market you're in. All those B2G1 ticket deals last year were not a good look for a company that is the #2 promotion in the country. ECW could've easily drawn more than 2,500 fans in Hammerstein when they'd be in the Tri-State area, but even Paul Heyman knew they'd have no chance of selling out MSG, so he didn't even try (he probably couldn't afford it regardless).
rpgfan
12-Mar(#91)They could have him win mitb.
PizzaTheHutt
* 12-Mar(#94)I finally caught up on the John Tenta/Earthquake episode of Dark Side of the Ring. This felt way off from a typical episode. First, around the halfway point of the episode, it's like they shift focus to Typhoon/Shockmaster. And overall, John was a genuinely good, honest person, so there was no scandal to talk about. This just felt more like a documentary than what you'd expect from a typical DSotR episode, because there was nothing "dark" about it at all. Still, I don't regret watching it though. It's nice to know not everyone was a scumbag from that era when cameras weren't rolling.
Edit: Oh yeah, and the episode reminded me of his brief WCW run with the Avalanche gimmick. I had totally forgotten about that, and years ago in one of the TEW games I had signed two jabronis whose names I've forgotten now, but I repackaged them under the Natural Disasters tag team gimmick and renamed them as Avalanche and Tsunami.
PizzaTheHutt
14-Mar(#98)PizzaTheHutt wrote:> I'm seeing a lot of people question why they chose to open the show with her debut
> instead of save it for the end. I personally didn't mind it though. I mean, we remember
> CM Punk's big return promo, and how it got cut short because it was saved to close
> the show and the match ahead of it went a little longer than it was supposed to.
> I'd rather take no chances of that happening again.
Maybe not the right call after all. People tuned in for her, but numbers steadily declined as viewers didn't stay for the entirety of the show (I admit I was guilty of that too). It did generate some buzz though. Tony Khan's Tweet that Adam Copeland was "All Elite" has 2.9 million views currently. The same Tweet for ol' Sasha has 2.5 million views in under 24 hours.
theJaw
* 15-Mar(#102)Wrestling’s super niche, even WWE - Smackdown just barely sneaks onto the top 100 annual shows for Nielsen. So many other shows do wildly better than pro wrestling in general, ratings-wise. As long as AEW stays the course, WBD will be satisfied — which is really all that matters. Khan has made it clear he expects a renewal, and WBD constantly touts how satisfied they are with their performance, so the ratings situation really is a nonissue. They’re contracted until December 31, so unless something catastrophic happens from now until Autumn (when renegotiations are likely to begin in earnest), AEW should be around for quite some time.
Saw an interesting stat yesterday. Between October 2019 (AEW’s debut on cable) to March 2023, average ratings suggest both WWE and AEW programming have lost 600,000 viewers give or take. Obviously ”worse” for AEW because their audience was smaller to begin with, but neither company’s TV audience is actively growing - instead dropping at a similar rate. These ratings drops aren’t indicative of either product either, just of the fact that households are cutting cable. This is reflected in the Nielsen ratings dwindling as a whole year after year.
It just is what it is. To dwell on TV ratings like they’re a true litmus test of either company’s success doesn’t really hold a ton of water. Again, wrestling is niche and that’s not changing any time soon. Overanalyzing AEW’s TV ratings is like overanalyzing an ant in the ratings landscape, and overanalyzing WWE’s TV ratings is like overanalyzing a slightly larger ant.
PizzaTheHutt
* 15-Mar(#105)Y2k wrote:> Sometimes it seems they'd get more people tuning in if they had a little bar on the
> side of the screen showing how many people were watching at home.
That would
> get all the WWE guys watching and put them ahead in ratings without having to sign
> anyone.
Obviously I get it's a joke post, but I think majority of "WWE guys" don't care about the ratings. But when Chris Jericho goes and says something so confidently, such as back in 2021 that "within 4-6 months" they'd be ahead of Raw in ratings, that's kinda giving the IWC nerds the okay to start caring about that sort of thing. For that to happen they'd just need to find a way to keep that Big Bang Theory audience from tuning out. That would fix everything.
Talking about a show's Nielsen ratings is not much different than the IWC nerds that circlejerk over Meltzer's star ratings. Change my mind.
PizzaTheHutt
15-Mar(#107)BucketofJustice wrote:> They’re booking to the people that are already there and never going away.
I feel like this is true too.
When there was that Wednesday Night War and each show was attracting 800K - 1M viewers each week, then when NXT moved to Tuesdays many people (including me) expected those NXT viewers that now have nothing to watch on Wednesdays would just change the channel and watch AEW since they were already in the habit of watching 'rassling on Wednesdays anyway. But it didn't seem to play out that way. It didn't bring many new eyeballs to their show, the people who want to watch it were already doing so.
It's not too different from the end of the Monday Night War. When WCW was bought out, Raw's ratings went way up from the new audience that was conditioned to watching wrestling on Mondays for the past 6 years, but that only lasted for a month before Raw's ratings went back to what they were already doing pre-WCW buyout. This was before the "invasion" storyline had even began, so without even knowing how bad that would turn out, I feel like by that point the majority of Nitro viewers had already made up their mind if they liked WWF or not.
PizzaTheHutt
15-Mar(#109)theJaw wrote:> @PizzaTheHutt I think for someone to get too caught up about somebody else’s star
> ratings (aka opinions) is super lame too… but at the very least that’s within
> the context of the actual content of the wrestling show, which is what people watching
> wrestling are actually passionate about. It isn’t people pretending (emphasis on
> pretending) that they actually, genuinely CARE about the TV ratings for the wrestling
> show they’re watching.
Yeah I get it. I personally pay no attention to his ratings, but there's a sizeable chunk of the IWC that act like his word is gospel for some reason. It's why memes like this get made:
image I feel like what the average 20 year old wrestling fan wants to see in a match is not necessarily the same as what 64 year old Dave Meltzer wants to see. Just like when I'm in that age group and I go to the theater to see Freddy Got Fingered (one of my all-time favorite comedy movies), I wasn't giving a crap about Siskel & Eibert's opinions of it.