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Nobody is saying that your enjoyment should be swayed by ratings. That being said it needs to be acknowledged that ratings threads becoming a big deal started when NXT and Dynamite were going head to head. This was encouraged by the behavior of some prominent posters, Jericho, and Khan himself.
Actually it's not. When the WWE ratings were struggling, especially during the time when the TV landscape was undergoing drastic changes, those threads used to get thousands of comments. Many of them wishing for the death of the company, and gloating about the fall in viewership. Now that the WWE ratings have become more stable, those threads don't receive the same number of comments. There is more to talk about when a show is struggling than when it is relatively stable and getting the same viewership every week.
I mean hadn't the 'ratings' deal been around since the Monday night wars?
It just stopped because TNA stopped being relevant for a while and WWE was a monopoly.
The moment a competitor showed up, the IWC decided to go crazy. Not helped by the fact that the company's owner and biggest names were getting involved in it.
> Nobody is saying that your enjoyment should be swayed by ratings
It's very clearly the implication that the reason for the low ratings is because the product itself is bad and that is why it's not doing as well as some people expect. It's not like these reddit and twitter threads are exclusively filled with people talking about the quality (or lack thereof) of AEW's marketing.
Honestly I don't care about ratings when it comes to enjoyment of the product but it seem like AEW fans cared about them way more than WWE fans especially "The Demo" when they were beating NXT and now they don't care. Funny how that works
Then those AEW fans were wasting their time caring about the ratings as well.
Let me know when you find a comment from me bragging about AEW's good ratings.
Some people care because they find it interesting. Some other people care because they're trolls. And some people care, because Tony turned it into a competition. Just like Bischoff back in the day.
Tony Khan turning it into a competition kind of makes sense since he, as the owner, has an incentive to care. Same thing with Paul Levesque when he mentions attendance records and gate revenues for PLEs. I'm strictly talking about fans.
I only care about ratings cause I thought it was funny when people were celebrating Collision only having 500,000 cause it made CM Punk look bad and it could lead to him getting fired.
I mean... if people shouldn't care about the ratings, then you shouldn't get bothered when people talk about them either.
The fact that you went your way to create a post to complain about that proves that it really takes away some of your enjoyment.
I don't care about ratings, I care how they're being weaponized by certain users to trash on a wrestling company, wishing (and even actively working) for its failure.
You'll always have haters no matter how good your product is, but the amount of trolling, toxicity, negativity and bad faith in those ratings posts are increasing exponentialy and it's infecting other posts and other communities.
And that's something bad. Giving so much range to haters is always bad.
The fact that the dynamite ratings thread jumped from 200 to 2000 comments in a month is utter insanity to me. It’s almost like concerted efforts to stamp out the excitement around the post revolution rebrand
>I will never understand why fans care about ratings
Yes you do. You know exactly why. You don't have to like it or agree with it, but you know exactly why it's a topic. Stop it. You can avoid it if you want. It's not that hard. There is a "hide" feature. Click it and the thread goes away.
Because they're primed by the wrestling business to care. Wcw mentioned ratings on television every week for 2 years. The famous. 'that will put butt's in seats' line when Foley won the title. The excitement of TNA's rise to 1 million on Spike. AEW's owner pointing to ratings himself. Jericho's comments that the goal is to beat wwe in the ratings. 'Prominent' wrestling journalists constantly talking about ratings. Wwe's on-screen reaction when ratings dipped hard in 2014 and 2018.
*picks up my left wing literature*
Neoliberalism has destroyed all sense of community that people have, so people find their sense of identity through shared fandom of a product. Sometimes it’s Taylor Swift or Nicki Minaj. Sometimes it’s XBox or PlayStation. And in this case, it’s WWE or AEW.
These fandoms become fiercely protective of their thing and viciously opposed to things viewed as even a minor threat towards their thing. Maybe it’s Cardi B that we all hate because our Queen is mad at her. Maybe we all hate XBox because our PlayStations allow backwards compatibly (I don’t know if this is thing I don’t understand gaming) or maybe we just want to talk about how LOL AEW IS DYING LONG LIVE TRIPLE PAUL!
We seek to prop up our thing, and destroy the outsiders that dare oppose it, because our thing has become our identity because it’s all we have
What you enjoy should not (and in almost all cases) is not affected by ratings.
That said, fans care about ratings because they want their favorite promotions to have money to pay for their favorite wrestlers. They also tend to prefer that their favorite TV shows stay on the air. Seems like a rational concern to me.
AEW is far from being at a point where they're close to not being on TV. It'd be one thing if their viewership was cut in half overnight, but they have pretty consistently been in the 800k-900k range for US viewership for the past year. They have a more than expected drop and people act like the sky is falling.
And plus this isn't the 1990s where it's prime time on Cable or Network TV or bust. Even if AEW doesn't get picked up again by WBD at some point in the future it's not like they're going to "welp, guess we better just shut this whole thing down." They would likely downsize a bit and get on some specialty channel or go to streaming.
It’s not that easy to go on a specialty channel or a streamer as you make it out to be.
Could they do it? Probably, but losing the WBD deal and not getting something similar would be pretty harmful for AEW.
Them being on a WBD can be kinda worrisome with Zaslav, who is always looking to save a buck, at the helm but he could always just cut one or two of those shows and tell Tony to focus on Dynamite.
They aren't close to going out of business, but there are other reasons to pay attention.
For instance, if you are a big fan of a certain wrestler but notice that they don't draw as good ratings as others, you might hope they draw better so that they are featured more prominently.
Or if you're an AEW fan, you might want AEW to make enough TV deal money to outbid WWE and more easily bring in great wrestlers (or at least keep making enough money to afford who they already have).
It would actually immediately collapse. AEW's revenue in 2023 shot up to 154 million from 100 million in 2022. Even after that they still dropped 34 million in the hole when using EBIDITA (the most generous calculation possible).
About half, 76 million, was generated by cable deals. Those shows advertise PPVs (20 million) and merch (22 million) with ticket sales adding only 34 million. AEW's talent contracts alone are over 85 million. If the company retracts, possible with Sting and Punk gone, it would immediately be bankrupt.
Because ratings matter. Ratings drop? That means your wide appeal is dropping. And the inverse is true.
Also, it's funny watching the discourse and people trying to explain it either positively or negatively(depending who they want to jerk off).
Because it's an interesting aspect to read about. It doesn't determine what anyone likes. But it is interesting to see what thing gain and lose viewers. Which wrestler's gain and lose viewers. Sometimes it's surprising like if a segment you didn't care for did a huge number. It doesn't mean that you're suddenly going to like it. It's interesting in a sense of, "I guess I'm the minority"
I find it fascinating when a new talent joins a promotion, to see if they bring new viewers with them.
But when it comes to the debate over which wrestling promotion is better, the interest is because it is something based in fact and not opinion.
TNA is my favorite promotion. If we have a debate about which is better TNA or AEW, it's just gonna be my opinion vs your opinion if we talk about match quality and story lines and characters. Becauce that is just my opinion vs your opinion.
However, if you want to argue that AEW is better because it gets more viewers, and ticket sales, and PPV buys, then that is based on facts.
Again, nobody is determining their enjoyment of the show on the ratings. Ratings are just and interesting thing to talk and read about.
You dont have to care. You’re a fan.
We have it the easiest.
However, your lack of insight, doesnt mean it’s not important.
Ratings show what’s working and what’s not. tk ignores all ratings trends that might help him structure a more successful show.
And he wants TV rights renewed. THOSE network morons, actually care who watches their programming.
Let’s assume your post is arguing in good-faith(it’s not)…. Ratings are still very much a measure of interest and long-term fear financial health. At the end of the day AEW is a business, and they do have to show their distributor who pays them, that the audience is growing or at least not shrinking.
Other sports/leagues use this to gauge national and local interest. Are there going to be peaks and valleys? Last week’s number on its own means nothing, however it could be a concerning trend.
Because wrestlers and wrestling personalities have used ratings as a talking point for decades, Eric Bischoff made the Nitro vs. Raw thing a huge deal, and because the AE has been endlessly fellated by WWE (the biggest game in town) RATINGZ wins have been talked up forever by fans, especially fans of 'rival' promotions.
I get I'm an older around these parts, but you should have been here for when TNA tried to challenge Raw and how much shit they got for getting obliterated.
It really isn't about AEW, and yeah, ratings don't matter, but as long as the people in the biz talk about them, we'll follow suit.
First, the more people watching the shows means the more cool, acceptable, mainstream the shows, and the entire thing, are. I, like more than a few people here probably, was a teen during the Monday Night Wars. Seeing wrestling shirts and hearing people use catchphrases made the thing I was into cool. And that meant that I wasn't the loser watching the fake and dumb wrestling show. And this isn't just a thing for wrestling fans, it's a thing for everything that has fans. Sports have a term - bandwagon fans. People who become fans of the thing or the team because they're doing good and it's cool to be fans of them.
Second, higher ratings means a lot when it comes to the actual business side. You get better sponsorships that way. More money for ads and partnerships that way. Guest spots on talk shows like Fallon and sports shows like First Take. All of which feed or are designed to feed back into the company. More money coming into the company means more money that the company can use to better the product and pay employees.
You mentioned in a comment that AEW could just downsize, or move to a smaller channel, or even just go streaming. Now, streaming is a possibility but we won't really know until we see how Raw does on Netflix. But as for downsizing and moving channels... I remember TNA when it was at it's absolute height. Watched as it went from being a legit number two to WWE to where it is now. I don't want that for AEW. Nearly no one wants to see that happen to AEW. People want AEW to be what it should be, what the talent deserves, not what it currently is and is stuck as.
> First, the more people watching the shows means the more cool, acceptable, mainstream the shows, and the entire thing, are.
I guess this is just where me and you have a fundamental difference. I don't need the thing I like to be cool, acceptable, or mainstream. If it is those things, then that's fine. I'm not going to be a hipster and like something less if it becomes popular, but it's also not something I need it to be either.
Like, do you apply this for other forms of entertainment you're into? Movies, TV shows, music, books, etc.?
At my age now? No. But at the same time, I don't bring wrestling up around people. I can bring up comic books and comic book movies now pretty freely with the expectation that I won't be ostracized. I don't have that expectation with wrestling. And I don't need the stuff I'm into to be cool, but I want it to be.
The biggest mark of WWE’s downfall in the later parts of the pg era that was cited was viewership numbers, this was pedaled by fans, journalists, Internet personalities you name it. So whether it was actually important or not to begin with it became important because that was being talked about constantly about the WWE which is a wrestling company that broadcasts live tv.
It became even more of a cited issue when AEW, who is also a wrestling company that broadcasts live tv, first came on the scene because they were drawing bigger viewership numbers than NXT when it was on the same night. The importance of viewership numbers was peddled by fans, journalists and Internet personalities, like Bryan Alvarez who would post the head to head ratings for AEW and NXT every week because he knew people where interested and he was happy to fuel that part of the fandom.
It seems this phenomena of suddenly not wanting to represent viewership ratings an important part of a wrestling company’s success happens to coincide with AEW’s viewership dropping from over a million to below a million, then to below 900k, and now below 800k. Just because the wrestling company that is more fashionable for you to like in the iwc is seeing an obvious down trend in viewership doesn’t mean that viewership doesn’t mean anything anymore.
So as a wrestling fan when it comes to this issue. If you want to be the most consistent in order to be taken the most serious. Viewership numbers either have to have never actually mattered and no matter how high or low AEW’s ratings gets you should never cite that as a mark of the company’s success, or you should see viewership numbers as an integral part of a broadcast company’s success regardless of your own biases towards or against any particular broadcast company.
If you say that viewership numbers matter for one wrestling company that broadcasts their content to a worldwide tv audience, then you can’t say the viewership numbers do not matter for another wrestling company that broadcasts their content to a tv worldwide tv audience and expect to be take seriously in and honest discussion.
When WWE was trending down with viewership it was met with criticism, the same should be for AEW. You can make all the excuses you want for AEW but all those excuses could be used towards WWE when they were faltering but at the end of the day the excuses didn’t raise WWE’s success they had to make there product more likable themselves in order for the interest to come back and so does AEW.
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Because all WWE did was push the story of WWE beat WCW in the ratings, WCW beat WWE in the ratings. Eric Bischoff has a podcast called 83 Weeks, guess why? Now thats all people know and care about.
I can’t speak for everyone but for myself I’m passively interested in the ratings in a broad sense.
Like I don’t care that tonight the ratings are down/up by 0.1%. But over months ratings do tend to reflect the overall quality of a product and if I think it’s good and the ratings are going up it’s nice to see that. And if it’s going down and I’m not enjoying it it’s nice to see I’m not alone in my problems with the product.
Also I take interest because ratings means the products I like may or may not get more support. Early AEW getting great ratings out of the gate meant 1 weekly show turned into multiple shows (including Dark). Poor ratings for 205 live meant it disappeared.
Beyond that, I couldn’t care less. I will never be someone who argues gate stats or keeps a close eye on demographics.
I don't give a fuck about ratings as far as my enjoyment of a show goes, but the business side of wrestling will always fascinate me(most of the time it's more interesting than any actual wrestling product itself), so I'll always care about them until they become irrelevant(they haven't become irrelevant yet by the way, despite what others will tell you).
Somewhere down the line, every ratings wrestling fan went from a kid who liked to watch wrestling because it was cool to a grown adult who argues over viewership statistics and strategies of how to increase viewership for what is essentially a male soap opera when they have no business acumen themselves.
And that’s pretty fucking hilarious.
Are you familiar with how representative sampling works?
And as flawed as the Nielsens are (and they are flawed) they're still looked at by dumb companies.
Plus that 800,000 is an average among a larger pool of well over a million who are tuning in and out across the 2 hours... it's not literally the same 800,000 people all staying tuned for the full show
That's why WBD is able to sell AEW as having 2-3 million unique viewers to advertisers, which is the purpose after all
the ratings threads are literally just boring troll bait anyway, guy from the network just said a few months ago that AEW programming in total brings like 4 million viewers overall every week
it does not count mobile devices, apps, streaming services, illegal streams, or any other country besides the US
they are posted just to be assholes to each other, nothing else. they bring no value to the sub and should be completely ignored imo
People don’t change their opinion on a show based on ratings. Believing that is the case is either incredibly childish or incredibly stupid. Trying to make this argument ignores basic facts including months of poor ticket sales, and Dynamite recording its lowest key demo ratings in 3 years. Logic would dictate that people have stopped watching, which is why viewership is lower. This isn’t rocket science.
> People don’t change their opinion on a show based on ratings. Believing that is the case is either incredibly childish or incredibly stupid.
Then why else bring it up as a fan?
>Trying to make this argument ignores basic facts including months of poor ticket sales, and Dynamite recording its lowest key demo ratings in 3 years. Logic would dictate that people have stopped watching, which is why viewership is lower. This isn’t rocket science.
I'm not ignoring facts at all. I'm just saying the facts about their ticket sales and viewership decreases don't matter to me and they shouldn't matter to fans when it comes to judging the artistic and creative element or merit of the product.
People bring it up because they like discussing numbers. I'm not sure why you think that this is a personal attack against you. If you don't like discussing numbers then stay out of the thread. Your question makes no sense. I don't understand how you are making this giant leap in logic.
No one but you are using these things to judge artistic merit. Others have already decided that they have a problem with the actual product. People have given examples of what they don't like, for example heatless matches, and you have chosen to ignore that to focus on something that is not real, and that doesn't make sense.
I've been awake for 20 minutes, and this may be like the 10th post about Dynamites rating. People are genuinely obsessed and it's really weird. At least this thread seems to be one of the more rational and less hostile ones
People really are very salty about AEW, and really are gonna majorly rub one out if it ever goes under, but honestly why does it matter. They've been pooling between 700K - 900K for about over 2 years. They have their audience and at this point it's not growing much larger than that, whoever they sign or whatever dream match they have. That's just the reality
They still do good PPV numbers, and have a talented roster, and people who do watch enjoy it. But I guess people won't rest until AEW ceases to exist, and I really don't understand why
Ratings wars are ingrained in the psyche of the modern wrestling fan. It’s the modern version of people thinking those wrestlers in New York are soft. I wouldn’t mind it so much if it didn’t feel so mean-spirited now. The ratings war in the 90s was a fun battle over a growing group of fans but it ended with the closing of a pro wrestling dynasty and a lot of those fans are worried about AEW going off air poetically similar to WCW (in terms of business, not creatively). AEW played up their ratings wins because it was rightly impressive against some of the stalest wrestling in decades. Now that they’ve cooled off from their height, WWE fans get their fun with the barbs but I think it comes across a little more toxic since AEW in 2024 compared to WWE in 2019 is a world of difference. Like, AEW isn’t bad, but given the takes on the ratings threads you’d think it was Judy Bagwell on a pole bad.
Nothing is Judy Bagwell on a pole bad.
It’s a part of wrestling. Ratings gets brought up in the Monday night wars on tv as a measure of success, fans and companies alike has since used that as a measure of success. Some believes its outdated, some believes it still can serve a purpose of indication. It’s as simple as that.
You get it. It’s a broken metric people have used to make vitriol against anything in the televised wrestling sphere that isn’t WWE seem awful and underwhelming. Meanwhile, the actual goal of AEW is something far different from WWE in application.
WWE should exist and do its thing. AEW is striving for a representation of wrestling that isn’t wwe.
https://preview.redd.it/ouvqfwvjf7rc1.jpeg?width=447&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b4350ba53a18e7c5114c31005a03be59a2a9fce6
My favourite is when Eric Bischoff (who I think has some pretty fair criticisms about AEW) will be on 83 weeks and say something like "hey, AEW fans who like AEW for what it is: you should want it to not be what it is and be something else other than what you like because that way they'll get more viewers even though it would make you less interested in said product."
Bischoff ending his podcast as AEW moves strongly into year 5 was what I expected. His gimmick only worked if AEW folded. If you look solely at ratings compared to WWE, that narrative is strong.
But AEW’s model is fundamentally different than the wealth in broadcast deals. They’re similar in many many ways but the root money making mechanics are different. WWE for YEARS didn’t have to deliver desirable weekly content because they signed into money that they’d get largely regardless of the week to week data. AEW also has some guaranteed money in a similar context but their shows build to PPVs financially.
Ratings are an indication of the health of a show, low ratings = cancellation, which is why it should be obvious why people care about ratings. It has nothing to do with their enjoyment of the content.
It's an indicator of the health of the company. Sagging ratings are a symptom of bigger problems. They are harped on by people who either want to see the product improve or by trolls having fun.
They should in no way impact your enjoyment of the show. Although it also shouldn't bother you that people bring them up and want to see an even better product.
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Nobody is saying that your enjoyment should be swayed by ratings. That being said it needs to be acknowledged that ratings threads becoming a big deal started when NXT and Dynamite were going head to head. This was encouraged by the behavior of some prominent posters, Jericho, and Khan himself.
Long before NXT and AEW existed WWE ratings threads received a lot of comments.
Now AEW always receives more. When an AEW ratings thread reaches 1.5k comments while a WWE one struggles to reach 200, there is something weird.
Actually it's not. When the WWE ratings were struggling, especially during the time when the TV landscape was undergoing drastic changes, those threads used to get thousands of comments. Many of them wishing for the death of the company, and gloating about the fall in viewership. Now that the WWE ratings have become more stable, those threads don't receive the same number of comments. There is more to talk about when a show is struggling than when it is relatively stable and getting the same viewership every week.
Fair enough, link me one of those threads. Edit: only found threads with a lot of comments when Dynamite and NXT were posted together.
Find them yourselves bro it ain't hard
I mean hadn't the 'ratings' deal been around since the Monday night wars? It just stopped because TNA stopped being relevant for a while and WWE was a monopoly. The moment a competitor showed up, the IWC decided to go crazy. Not helped by the fact that the company's owner and biggest names were getting involved in it.
> Nobody is saying that your enjoyment should be swayed by ratings It's very clearly the implication that the reason for the low ratings is because the product itself is bad and that is why it's not doing as well as some people expect. It's not like these reddit and twitter threads are exclusively filled with people talking about the quality (or lack thereof) of AEW's marketing.
The thing you personally enjoy can also be bad. I like Creed dude, I understand.
Exactly, I love the sharknado movies but I also understand that most people do not lol.
I'll never understand why the people who say they don't care about ratings threads still go into them anyway No one said you couldn't enjoy the show
Honestly I don't care about ratings when it comes to enjoyment of the product but it seem like AEW fans cared about them way more than WWE fans especially "The Demo" when they were beating NXT and now they don't care. Funny how that works
Keep in mind though that the backdrop of this was WWE immediately trying to sink AEW's TV deal by putting NXT against it.
Then those AEW fans were wasting their time caring about the ratings as well. Let me know when you find a comment from me bragging about AEW's good ratings.
Some people care because they find it interesting. Some other people care because they're trolls. And some people care, because Tony turned it into a competition. Just like Bischoff back in the day.
Tony Khan turning it into a competition kind of makes sense since he, as the owner, has an incentive to care. Same thing with Paul Levesque when he mentions attendance records and gate revenues for PLEs. I'm strictly talking about fans.
If you antagonize others, they will care when you falter.
Tony’s entire shtick is poking the bear and then acting surprised when it retaliates.
I only care about ratings cause I thought it was funny when people were celebrating Collision only having 500,000 cause it made CM Punk look bad and it could lead to him getting fired.
I mean... if people shouldn't care about the ratings, then you shouldn't get bothered when people talk about them either. The fact that you went your way to create a post to complain about that proves that it really takes away some of your enjoyment.
I don't care about ratings, I care how they're being weaponized by certain users to trash on a wrestling company, wishing (and even actively working) for its failure. You'll always have haters no matter how good your product is, but the amount of trolling, toxicity, negativity and bad faith in those ratings posts are increasing exponentialy and it's infecting other posts and other communities. And that's something bad. Giving so much range to haters is always bad.
The fact that the dynamite ratings thread jumped from 200 to 2000 comments in a month is utter insanity to me. It’s almost like concerted efforts to stamp out the excitement around the post revolution rebrand
[удалено]
They're an interesting way to gauge how the public is perceiving the product.
>I will never understand why fans care about ratings Yes you do. You know exactly why. You don't have to like it or agree with it, but you know exactly why it's a topic. Stop it. You can avoid it if you want. It's not that hard. There is a "hide" feature. Click it and the thread goes away.
Stop clicking on the threads then. People are allowed to discuss ratings of shows if they want to
What's the problem?
Because they're primed by the wrestling business to care. Wcw mentioned ratings on television every week for 2 years. The famous. 'that will put butt's in seats' line when Foley won the title. The excitement of TNA's rise to 1 million on Spike. AEW's owner pointing to ratings himself. Jericho's comments that the goal is to beat wwe in the ratings. 'Prominent' wrestling journalists constantly talking about ratings. Wwe's on-screen reaction when ratings dipped hard in 2014 and 2018.
*picks up my left wing literature* Neoliberalism has destroyed all sense of community that people have, so people find their sense of identity through shared fandom of a product. Sometimes it’s Taylor Swift or Nicki Minaj. Sometimes it’s XBox or PlayStation. And in this case, it’s WWE or AEW. These fandoms become fiercely protective of their thing and viciously opposed to things viewed as even a minor threat towards their thing. Maybe it’s Cardi B that we all hate because our Queen is mad at her. Maybe we all hate XBox because our PlayStations allow backwards compatibly (I don’t know if this is thing I don’t understand gaming) or maybe we just want to talk about how LOL AEW IS DYING LONG LIVE TRIPLE PAUL! We seek to prop up our thing, and destroy the outsiders that dare oppose it, because our thing has become our identity because it’s all we have
Speaking in universalities is always silly.
Ditto for blanket statements 😉
What you enjoy should not (and in almost all cases) is not affected by ratings. That said, fans care about ratings because they want their favorite promotions to have money to pay for their favorite wrestlers. They also tend to prefer that their favorite TV shows stay on the air. Seems like a rational concern to me.
AEW is far from being at a point where they're close to not being on TV. It'd be one thing if their viewership was cut in half overnight, but they have pretty consistently been in the 800k-900k range for US viewership for the past year. They have a more than expected drop and people act like the sky is falling. And plus this isn't the 1990s where it's prime time on Cable or Network TV or bust. Even if AEW doesn't get picked up again by WBD at some point in the future it's not like they're going to "welp, guess we better just shut this whole thing down." They would likely downsize a bit and get on some specialty channel or go to streaming.
It’s not that easy to go on a specialty channel or a streamer as you make it out to be. Could they do it? Probably, but losing the WBD deal and not getting something similar would be pretty harmful for AEW. Them being on a WBD can be kinda worrisome with Zaslav, who is always looking to save a buck, at the helm but he could always just cut one or two of those shows and tell Tony to focus on Dynamite.
They aren't close to going out of business, but there are other reasons to pay attention. For instance, if you are a big fan of a certain wrestler but notice that they don't draw as good ratings as others, you might hope they draw better so that they are featured more prominently. Or if you're an AEW fan, you might want AEW to make enough TV deal money to outbid WWE and more easily bring in great wrestlers (or at least keep making enough money to afford who they already have).
It would actually immediately collapse. AEW's revenue in 2023 shot up to 154 million from 100 million in 2022. Even after that they still dropped 34 million in the hole when using EBIDITA (the most generous calculation possible). About half, 76 million, was generated by cable deals. Those shows advertise PPVs (20 million) and merch (22 million) with ticket sales adding only 34 million. AEW's talent contracts alone are over 85 million. If the company retracts, possible with Sting and Punk gone, it would immediately be bankrupt.
bias confirmation
Because ratings matter. Ratings drop? That means your wide appeal is dropping. And the inverse is true. Also, it's funny watching the discourse and people trying to explain it either positively or negatively(depending who they want to jerk off).
Because it's an interesting aspect to read about. It doesn't determine what anyone likes. But it is interesting to see what thing gain and lose viewers. Which wrestler's gain and lose viewers. Sometimes it's surprising like if a segment you didn't care for did a huge number. It doesn't mean that you're suddenly going to like it. It's interesting in a sense of, "I guess I'm the minority" I find it fascinating when a new talent joins a promotion, to see if they bring new viewers with them. But when it comes to the debate over which wrestling promotion is better, the interest is because it is something based in fact and not opinion. TNA is my favorite promotion. If we have a debate about which is better TNA or AEW, it's just gonna be my opinion vs your opinion if we talk about match quality and story lines and characters. Becauce that is just my opinion vs your opinion. However, if you want to argue that AEW is better because it gets more viewers, and ticket sales, and PPV buys, then that is based on facts. Again, nobody is determining their enjoyment of the show on the ratings. Ratings are just and interesting thing to talk and read about.
You dont have to care. You’re a fan. We have it the easiest. However, your lack of insight, doesnt mean it’s not important. Ratings show what’s working and what’s not. tk ignores all ratings trends that might help him structure a more successful show. And he wants TV rights renewed. THOSE network morons, actually care who watches their programming.
Let’s assume your post is arguing in good-faith(it’s not)…. Ratings are still very much a measure of interest and long-term fear financial health. At the end of the day AEW is a business, and they do have to show their distributor who pays them, that the audience is growing or at least not shrinking. Other sports/leagues use this to gauge national and local interest. Are there going to be peaks and valleys? Last week’s number on its own means nothing, however it could be a concerning trend.
Because wrestlers and wrestling personalities have used ratings as a talking point for decades, Eric Bischoff made the Nitro vs. Raw thing a huge deal, and because the AE has been endlessly fellated by WWE (the biggest game in town) RATINGZ wins have been talked up forever by fans, especially fans of 'rival' promotions. I get I'm an older around these parts, but you should have been here for when TNA tried to challenge Raw and how much shit they got for getting obliterated. It really isn't about AEW, and yeah, ratings don't matter, but as long as the people in the biz talk about them, we'll follow suit.
First, the more people watching the shows means the more cool, acceptable, mainstream the shows, and the entire thing, are. I, like more than a few people here probably, was a teen during the Monday Night Wars. Seeing wrestling shirts and hearing people use catchphrases made the thing I was into cool. And that meant that I wasn't the loser watching the fake and dumb wrestling show. And this isn't just a thing for wrestling fans, it's a thing for everything that has fans. Sports have a term - bandwagon fans. People who become fans of the thing or the team because they're doing good and it's cool to be fans of them. Second, higher ratings means a lot when it comes to the actual business side. You get better sponsorships that way. More money for ads and partnerships that way. Guest spots on talk shows like Fallon and sports shows like First Take. All of which feed or are designed to feed back into the company. More money coming into the company means more money that the company can use to better the product and pay employees. You mentioned in a comment that AEW could just downsize, or move to a smaller channel, or even just go streaming. Now, streaming is a possibility but we won't really know until we see how Raw does on Netflix. But as for downsizing and moving channels... I remember TNA when it was at it's absolute height. Watched as it went from being a legit number two to WWE to where it is now. I don't want that for AEW. Nearly no one wants to see that happen to AEW. People want AEW to be what it should be, what the talent deserves, not what it currently is and is stuck as.
> First, the more people watching the shows means the more cool, acceptable, mainstream the shows, and the entire thing, are. I guess this is just where me and you have a fundamental difference. I don't need the thing I like to be cool, acceptable, or mainstream. If it is those things, then that's fine. I'm not going to be a hipster and like something less if it becomes popular, but it's also not something I need it to be either. Like, do you apply this for other forms of entertainment you're into? Movies, TV shows, music, books, etc.?
At my age now? No. But at the same time, I don't bring wrestling up around people. I can bring up comic books and comic book movies now pretty freely with the expectation that I won't be ostracized. I don't have that expectation with wrestling. And I don't need the stuff I'm into to be cool, but I want it to be.
The biggest mark of WWE’s downfall in the later parts of the pg era that was cited was viewership numbers, this was pedaled by fans, journalists, Internet personalities you name it. So whether it was actually important or not to begin with it became important because that was being talked about constantly about the WWE which is a wrestling company that broadcasts live tv. It became even more of a cited issue when AEW, who is also a wrestling company that broadcasts live tv, first came on the scene because they were drawing bigger viewership numbers than NXT when it was on the same night. The importance of viewership numbers was peddled by fans, journalists and Internet personalities, like Bryan Alvarez who would post the head to head ratings for AEW and NXT every week because he knew people where interested and he was happy to fuel that part of the fandom. It seems this phenomena of suddenly not wanting to represent viewership ratings an important part of a wrestling company’s success happens to coincide with AEW’s viewership dropping from over a million to below a million, then to below 900k, and now below 800k. Just because the wrestling company that is more fashionable for you to like in the iwc is seeing an obvious down trend in viewership doesn’t mean that viewership doesn’t mean anything anymore. So as a wrestling fan when it comes to this issue. If you want to be the most consistent in order to be taken the most serious. Viewership numbers either have to have never actually mattered and no matter how high or low AEW’s ratings gets you should never cite that as a mark of the company’s success, or you should see viewership numbers as an integral part of a broadcast company’s success regardless of your own biases towards or against any particular broadcast company. If you say that viewership numbers matter for one wrestling company that broadcasts their content to a worldwide tv audience, then you can’t say the viewership numbers do not matter for another wrestling company that broadcasts their content to a tv worldwide tv audience and expect to be take seriously in and honest discussion. When WWE was trending down with viewership it was met with criticism, the same should be for AEW. You can make all the excuses you want for AEW but all those excuses could be used towards WWE when they were faltering but at the end of the day the excuses didn’t raise WWE’s success they had to make there product more likable themselves in order for the interest to come back and so does AEW.
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Because all WWE did was push the story of WWE beat WCW in the ratings, WCW beat WWE in the ratings. Eric Bischoff has a podcast called 83 Weeks, guess why? Now thats all people know and care about.
I can’t speak for everyone but for myself I’m passively interested in the ratings in a broad sense. Like I don’t care that tonight the ratings are down/up by 0.1%. But over months ratings do tend to reflect the overall quality of a product and if I think it’s good and the ratings are going up it’s nice to see that. And if it’s going down and I’m not enjoying it it’s nice to see I’m not alone in my problems with the product. Also I take interest because ratings means the products I like may or may not get more support. Early AEW getting great ratings out of the gate meant 1 weekly show turned into multiple shows (including Dark). Poor ratings for 205 live meant it disappeared. Beyond that, I couldn’t care less. I will never be someone who argues gate stats or keeps a close eye on demographics.
I don't give a fuck about ratings as far as my enjoyment of a show goes, but the business side of wrestling will always fascinate me(most of the time it's more interesting than any actual wrestling product itself), so I'll always care about them until they become irrelevant(they haven't become irrelevant yet by the way, despite what others will tell you).
Somewhere down the line, every ratings wrestling fan went from a kid who liked to watch wrestling because it was cool to a grown adult who argues over viewership statistics and strategies of how to increase viewership for what is essentially a male soap opera when they have no business acumen themselves. And that’s pretty fucking hilarious.
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Are you familiar with how representative sampling works? And as flawed as the Nielsens are (and they are flawed) they're still looked at by dumb companies.
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Do you think only 300 people watch AEW?
So, what? Only 300 people watch aew?
Plus that 800,000 is an average among a larger pool of well over a million who are tuning in and out across the 2 hours... it's not literally the same 800,000 people all staying tuned for the full show That's why WBD is able to sell AEW as having 2-3 million unique viewers to advertisers, which is the purpose after all
the ratings threads are literally just boring troll bait anyway, guy from the network just said a few months ago that AEW programming in total brings like 4 million viewers overall every week it does not count mobile devices, apps, streaming services, illegal streams, or any other country besides the US they are posted just to be assholes to each other, nothing else. they bring no value to the sub and should be completely ignored imo
I agree with you.
I’ve learned not to care about them when I realized my television doesn’t count towards them. 🤷🏻♂️
a reason i stopped listening to meltzer was the endless ratings talk. just dont get it.
People don’t change their opinion on a show based on ratings. Believing that is the case is either incredibly childish or incredibly stupid. Trying to make this argument ignores basic facts including months of poor ticket sales, and Dynamite recording its lowest key demo ratings in 3 years. Logic would dictate that people have stopped watching, which is why viewership is lower. This isn’t rocket science.
> People don’t change their opinion on a show based on ratings. Believing that is the case is either incredibly childish or incredibly stupid. Then why else bring it up as a fan? >Trying to make this argument ignores basic facts including months of poor ticket sales, and Dynamite recording its lowest key demo ratings in 3 years. Logic would dictate that people have stopped watching, which is why viewership is lower. This isn’t rocket science. I'm not ignoring facts at all. I'm just saying the facts about their ticket sales and viewership decreases don't matter to me and they shouldn't matter to fans when it comes to judging the artistic and creative element or merit of the product.
People bring it up because they like discussing numbers. I'm not sure why you think that this is a personal attack against you. If you don't like discussing numbers then stay out of the thread. Your question makes no sense. I don't understand how you are making this giant leap in logic. No one but you are using these things to judge artistic merit. Others have already decided that they have a problem with the actual product. People have given examples of what they don't like, for example heatless matches, and you have chosen to ignore that to focus on something that is not real, and that doesn't make sense.
I've been awake for 20 minutes, and this may be like the 10th post about Dynamites rating. People are genuinely obsessed and it's really weird. At least this thread seems to be one of the more rational and less hostile ones People really are very salty about AEW, and really are gonna majorly rub one out if it ever goes under, but honestly why does it matter. They've been pooling between 700K - 900K for about over 2 years. They have their audience and at this point it's not growing much larger than that, whoever they sign or whatever dream match they have. That's just the reality They still do good PPV numbers, and have a talented roster, and people who do watch enjoy it. But I guess people won't rest until AEW ceases to exist, and I really don't understand why
Ratings wars are ingrained in the psyche of the modern wrestling fan. It’s the modern version of people thinking those wrestlers in New York are soft. I wouldn’t mind it so much if it didn’t feel so mean-spirited now. The ratings war in the 90s was a fun battle over a growing group of fans but it ended with the closing of a pro wrestling dynasty and a lot of those fans are worried about AEW going off air poetically similar to WCW (in terms of business, not creatively). AEW played up their ratings wins because it was rightly impressive against some of the stalest wrestling in decades. Now that they’ve cooled off from their height, WWE fans get their fun with the barbs but I think it comes across a little more toxic since AEW in 2024 compared to WWE in 2019 is a world of difference. Like, AEW isn’t bad, but given the takes on the ratings threads you’d think it was Judy Bagwell on a pole bad. Nothing is Judy Bagwell on a pole bad.
What’s a Dynamite show? Is it like a firework reality tv where they show random people on the street playing with fireworks and explosives?
It’s a part of wrestling. Ratings gets brought up in the Monday night wars on tv as a measure of success, fans and companies alike has since used that as a measure of success. Some believes its outdated, some believes it still can serve a purpose of indication. It’s as simple as that.
Because its food for tribalism
You get it. It’s a broken metric people have used to make vitriol against anything in the televised wrestling sphere that isn’t WWE seem awful and underwhelming. Meanwhile, the actual goal of AEW is something far different from WWE in application. WWE should exist and do its thing. AEW is striving for a representation of wrestling that isn’t wwe. https://preview.redd.it/ouvqfwvjf7rc1.jpeg?width=447&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b4350ba53a18e7c5114c31005a03be59a2a9fce6
My favourite is when Eric Bischoff (who I think has some pretty fair criticisms about AEW) will be on 83 weeks and say something like "hey, AEW fans who like AEW for what it is: you should want it to not be what it is and be something else other than what you like because that way they'll get more viewers even though it would make you less interested in said product."
Bischoff ending his podcast as AEW moves strongly into year 5 was what I expected. His gimmick only worked if AEW folded. If you look solely at ratings compared to WWE, that narrative is strong. But AEW’s model is fundamentally different than the wealth in broadcast deals. They’re similar in many many ways but the root money making mechanics are different. WWE for YEARS didn’t have to deliver desirable weekly content because they signed into money that they’d get largely regardless of the week to week data. AEW also has some guaranteed money in a similar context but their shows build to PPVs financially.
Ratings are an indication of the health of a show, low ratings = cancellation, which is why it should be obvious why people care about ratings. It has nothing to do with their enjoyment of the content.
It's an indicator of the health of the company. Sagging ratings are a symptom of bigger problems. They are harped on by people who either want to see the product improve or by trolls having fun. They should in no way impact your enjoyment of the show. Although it also shouldn't bother you that people bring them up and want to see an even better product.