Holy shit. There are some things that need addressing on their end.

This is one of the most insightful posts in a long time. You know you can just post memes that you find on other platforms, right?

It’s a good post, but I don’t think it’s 100% true. Certain things do have crossover appeal. If you play trivia, some things are considered general knowledge enough that the onus is kind of on you to know them. But yes, the evolution of media has definitely crafted a “designer celebrity.” That’s a great term for it.

its not absolute, not yet any way. but >40 general celebrity is skewing in this "dsigner celebrity" trend and hard. right now we have the marvel films as a cultural water cooler but that has a shelf life, theaters in general have one in my opinion but thats a seperate conversation altogether, we are heading in a more and ever more niche trajectory with no signs of turning back.

A recent episode of the Strictly Business with Eric Bischoff podcast had NBC Universal Studios Group Business Affairs Manager Mik Pandit as the guest. One of the topics discussed included Pandit’s thoughts on AEW’s television ratings on TNT and TBS.

“I think that is a huge advantage for them. This is not revealing anything internal but NBCU Executives have been very clear with how pleased they are with the WWE’s drive of subscribers to the Peacock platform. Part of the advantage for WWE is there are new events each month, yes but then two, arguably three or four times a year, they have these big events. Your WrestleManias, the upcoming supershow in the UK, Saudi events that drive consumers who might not have been subscribed to say I have to watch this.

They’re loyal, they want to see new content. Is a baseline of a million viewers something Tony can sell as an advantage for him? Yes, the question is what is the price he’s going to get for that? Now as we see more consolidation in the industry and their partnership primarily with WarnerMedia that’s being run by Discovery Executives, not Warner Executives, from all intensive purposes from what we have seen and I don’t know anyone in that organization, but they’re going to run a much leaner and meaner business than Warner had planned on running. Now does that mean AEW is going to get the kind of live rights media fees that they would’ve gotten a couple of years ago? I don’t know the answer to that but I think the advantage for AEW is that even at an increase to what they’re currently getting paid which is around 40-45 million a year, it’s still probably cheaper than scripted programming.”

Pandit also gave his thoughts about the potential of AEW signing a streaming deal with HBO Max in the future.

“I don’t know Nick Khan but he was making this point repeatedly. That we were seeing what they call peak subscription or subscription fatigue when it comes to streaming service. Five years ago when there was Netflix and the WWE Network, it was great, you pay $10 and you get all the wrestling in the world. Now HBO Max is $15 a month, Disney Plus is $10 a month, Netflix is probably $17 a month, and Paramount is $10, there are many other products even outside of entertainment consumption that are subscription-based.

You’re getting to a point to where justifying paying $10 a month just for wrestling content is going to be very difficult for all but the most hardcore of consumers. Somebody who probably watches wrestling one out of every three pay-per-views probably wouldn’t. AEWs advantage is they have on average 1 million linear cable viewers week to week. Most of those people probably have access to an HBO Max so I would imagine it’s more valuable for HBO Max to have that content on HBO Max so they can grow their subscription base and retain it. Of those 1 million AEW fans, if let’s say half of them subscribe to HBO Max, that’s a solid 400,000 fans and subscribers who are going to drop off at a lower rate than your average subscriber.”

2 things I took away from this:

1) “all intensive purposes” :lol:

2) FEDBAD

Am I doing it right?

A deal with some sort of sporting/live event streaming service with Warner would be optimal for them. I cannot see the HBO Max deal making that much sense for either side, outside of maybe one or two specials a year.

AEW gets 900k viewers with a cable base of 90 million people. A streaming service that has 75 million or whatever is probably going to get considerably less. You could argue that people more actively engage with OTT services these days, but it’s reasonable to expect a couple of hundred thousand people to tune in. Is this going to drive up subscription numbers notably? Is it worth forking out tens of millions of dollars for?

The TNT specials that have been thrown away on Battle of the Belts would have been good auditions for this sort of programming. If they could have gotten spikes notably higher than Dynamite, it may have been something to take into negotiations with Warner about. They could have done Winter is Coming, Fight for the Fallen and maybe another show on HBO Max every year.

Condense your fucking posts, Noid.

an in app ad banner on hbomax could go a long way. thats better than the average tv ad spot by miles

AEW is falling victim to diversity moves. Putting on women and talents that check certain boxes into main events just because it's time. Well for me I can't remember seeing Deana Purazzo before in my life and couldn't give a shit about a main event involving her if I had to.

Sammy Guevera is not a main event guy, yet he's closed more Dynamite's than anyone except maybe Darby, who also is not a great main eventer but continually closes Dynamite.

Scorpio Sky is not a main event talent and yet continually gets put to close Dynamite.

AEW's ratings are stalled because they keep forcing main events down our throat that taste like midcard. Tony so badly wants to be fair that it's stalling them out from progress.

Yes Jordan, join us on the dark side. It is your destiny.

Remember when AEW's entire business model was "don't worry, our next TV deals will be for $200 million a year, so LFG!!!!!!!!!!".

Now they are all "hey Warner Discovery loves us, they will surely keep us on for only $45 million a year, its such a good deal, so LFG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!".

Pretty sure during good TNT title run Darby pulled out a few 1 million viewers when her main evented.

But I agree with what you’re saying in general. The main event should be for the top top guys. Punk, Hangman, Jericho, MJF and Wardlow have the biggest angles running. Those are the guys who should be closing out Dynamite.

:y:

Diversity isn’t a bad thing. But you can have talented and established talent take those spots. No one really complaints about Bianca Belair or Bobby Lashley being in their spots because they aren’t token spots. WWE has actually done a lot of good work in normalizing women and men from diverse ethnic backgrounds into pretty meaningful roles within the company.

Some of the women in AEW might be talented, but Mercedes Martinez and Deanna Purrazzo have not “earned” that spot yet. Hell, ROH hasn’t earned that spot within the company yet. Why is another promotion’s belt being defended in the main event of Dynamite? Some people just want to watch what they nominated to watch.

AEW botching getting Danielson is so similar to WCW getting Bret Hart and not knowing what to do with him. In my opinion.

The overnight number for Rampage, which will probably increase, is 319k. Compare that to the third hour of Raw. Fucking yikes.

If Kathleen Finch is looking for reasons to get wrestling off TNT and TBS, Rampage failing is a good way to make it “their fault.” That and some of their content for morality purposes. But I remember the $45 million deal AEW signed being for Dynamite and what would become Rampage. If Rampage underperforms and AEW isn’t living up to their end of the bargain in generating viewers—WBD probably has a very clear path to cancelling their asses.

Rampage getting that death slot may have always been a planned out for Warner if the time ever came for it.

Why doesn't Tony just tell Warner when he wants his shows to air? That is how it works right? AEW has been telling us for years WWE only kept airing show on Wednesdays because Vince told USA Network he wanted to hurt poor widdle ole AEW, right?

Remember when TK tweeted that he chose the Rampage slot? Like anyone chooses Friday at 10 for their TV.

I also love it when people suggest the show gets a 7pm time slot instead. TK didn’t choose to go on at this time. He doesn’t have the weight or leverage to promote his show when it is underperforming as it is.

Does a broadcaster have to be so Machiavellian as to have purposefully planned to pay for extra content only to air it in a bad timeslot so that they have a reason to dump the show? Can’t they just go “nah, we don’t want it anymore and we don’t even need to justify it”?

Well, the other option was that they gave AEW a new weekly show and a bunch of TV specials because they were pleased with what they were already getting and wanted more.

And THAT can’t possibly be the case so... elaborate sabotage.

i cant take the idea "we like you here's a friday slot" too seriously. more like "here's the worst slot we have. if you can make this work we'll talk."

The one thing I feel pro wrestling really can't get away with anymore is taped shows. We saw it with last week's Smackdown, and we see it with the majority of Rampage episodes. If the wrestling is not a live show, the ratings are significantly lower.

Yes the 10:00pm timeslot is never going to get a large audience, but at least the live episodes get an additional 150-200k more viewers. The problem is that it is hard to justify renting out a 2nd arena for a 1 hour show, and the ad rate difference between 500,000 and 350,000 viewers is likely not very different.

It is cost effective to tape everything on the same night, but when they base so much of their bragging rights on ratings, it does hurt their case when they are doing much lower than they could do by not running Rampage live every week.

True. Rampage was a bad idea altogether. Too much, too soon.

Yeah, it was most likely a “fuck it, see if wrestling nerds follow you into this” scenario.

Sure, they could always cancel it without justification. Wrestling fans are an educated and understanding lot. Having justification is always nice though. But that’s always a game of perception. They could use low ratings or morality, as I said. It’s just fun stirring up the apologists.

I don’t put it past broadcasters to be Machiavellian at all though. But it was likely a crapshoot because they had to give them a slot and gave them the worst one to see if it could turn empty space into something. And that got a big, fat foghorn.

It stunk of WCW Thunder.

Something else I’ll throw out there: Kevin Riley made the deal with AEW, right? We’ve been led to believe it was for the two shows with an ad revenue split. I don’t know how that’s changed over time with the TNT specials being thrown into the mix, but Brett Weiz would end up taking Riley’s place at some point. It’s definitely possible that buyer’s remorse or some form of passive aggressiveness coming out of the shakeups has informed how AEW is programmed too.

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:rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:

Holy shit…

AEW fanboys are predictably quiet on this one.

1.65 million for RAW

Great number compared to AEW.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">CM Punk Takes and Actual facts 😉 <a href="https://t.co/5f33KlKaQy">pic.twitter.com/5f33KlKaQy</a></p>&mdash; Unpaid Critic (@Unpaid__Critic) <a href="https://twitter.com/Unpaid__Critic/status/1524078376708755456?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 10, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

CM Punk draws attention at first, then he loses it. This has been the pattern since 2011.

To clarify, the first hour of Raw got 1.73 million viewers. The second got 1.63 mil. The third hour got 1.593 mil viewers.

If you want to compare third hours of each company’s programming outside of prime time, Rampage got 292k. Granted, it was out of its usual time slot. That’s because it’s not important, but nevertheless. If you’re someone who pays attention to Meltzer’s bullshit about demo — Raw’s third hour got 0.43 compared to Rampage’s 0.11. Raw actually increased over the third hour.

*Farts*

NXT @ #51 with 533k

NXT is closer to Dynamite than Dynamite is to the third hour of Raw.

Next person to post in this thread is gay!

Oh hey guys

:lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol:

Dynamite was no match this week for the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, coming in at #5


https://i.postimg.cc/dVDjMZg5/Screen...3-36-11-PM.png

Ouch. 2000 WCW Worldwide called. They'd like their ratings back

Honest question: Worldwide would have done better numbers, no?

Worldwide was syndicated so probably

it absolutely did

the business was super hot though. live wire pulled better numbers

AEW should bring in Scott Hudson

Seconded

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Lots of good eating today!

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Give me Lee Marshall calling in from random pay phones throughout the country

Well, the good news is that the Rampage rating is up. It’s up from a record low show, but up is up, right?

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That’s even if the ratings pop. People are seeing through this shit now.

Doesn’t really matter if it does if it’s not sustained. Would those debuts/returns have captured interest?

:y:

It’s done.

they said for the billionth time xD

Wow this ship is taking on water fast!

What does Discovery see in them? What is anyone else going to see? They’ve wasted everything.

2.031 million for SmackDown.

410k for Rampage.

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929k for the coolest wrestling program in the world today!

I can’t wait to hear the apologies when the reality hits people.

1.49 million for RAW, I wonder if that's a record low

AEW does lower numbers than that every week. :wtf:

drawing only a half-million more than a company with less than a fraction of the longevity and brand recognition is hardly a brag, Noid, you fucking insufferable jackoff.

AEW really shouldnt be the measuring stick of success

TNA has done numbers that dwarf anything AEW has ever done.

IM JUST SAYING

This thread suffers from downs syndrome! I can see it in all your faces, the way they droop low and the slop runs out the crevice of your lips. You cannot accurately compare TNA in 2010 ratings with AEW in 2022. The cable audience is much smaller now than it was then. It's a simple as that. That's also the reason WWE's rating compare so low to TNA from 2010 or themselves from any previous era.

WWE dipping as low as AEW's highest rating is just the place where wrestling and cable is. If WWE and AEW were on Network TV they'd be drawing probably half more or double the audience they have now, cable isn't on everyone's TV in 2022 like it was in 2010, or 1998.

And by the way you twits, the big wig TNT exec's tweeted pics of them slamming beers and choking each other with their ties while watching Dynamite and were firing blunts in the private suites. Word is that Tony and the execs left the arena arm over shoulder chuckling about the night's events and what a cuck Vince McMahon is now that Nick Kahn is running that shit show. AEW forever.

lol shut up you mark

I definitely thought this was about to be a play on words. Nope. :lol:

It’s true. TNA had the problem of never being able to really move past a 1.1 rating. AEW has the problem of never being able to move past a viewership of 1.1 million people.

Raw is a 3hr show broadcast that spreads out of prime time. Imagine how much worse a 3hr Dynamite would do? You see the damage Rampage takes by being in its slot. Somehow people can’t help themselves but try and make that sort of tailing a win though. Like it’s impossible to actually be a hit on television.

What’s also constantly ignored is the WWE’s global presence. Is Rampage on in Canada yet? I know there isn’t the demand for it here in Australia. Then you’ve also go WWE’s growing streaming deals, and their plans for actually relevant technology. How is that HBO Max deal going for AEW?

WWE is the dinosaur, yet they are kicking ass and taking the definite lead with contemporary media. Gotta be a mark for those archaic and misunderstood Nielsens, which they aren’t even winning.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">AEW Dynamite last night on TBS:<br>969,000 viewers<br>P18-49 rating: 0.40 (522,000)<br><br>Highest P18-49 since March 23. Highest total viewership since April 13.<br> �� <a href="https://t.co/1SscdBCpr8">https://t.co/1SscdBCpr8</a> <a href="https://t.co/T8LOsqMTEl">pic.twitter.com/T8LOsqMTEl</a></p>&mdash; Brandon Thurston (@BrandonThurston) <a href="https://twitter.com/BrandonThurston/status/1532452558949826565?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 2, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Lol.

Fanboys: HAHA! They worked everyone!

AEW Dynamite: *gets 969k viewers*

MEGA SUPERSTAR GAME CHANGER AND TOTALLY LEGITIMATE TOUGH FIGHTER MAN PHILLIP LEADING THE CHARGE AS WORLD CHAMPION MANAGES TO SUCCESSFULLY LEAD AEW TO ANOTHER UNDER A MILLION RATING!!! WOOOOOOOOOOOOW!

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This is actually interesting. TNA at its peak was pulling over 1.10 million viewers. RAW is about to fall under those number. We can use TNA of old to be the measuring stick for the official death of wrestling.

as always it should be noted we dont have any clue how many people view anything on cable. the nielson system has no value any longer. on may 2nd neilson settled for $77 million over them giving unrelaible (and knowingly bogus) data. those numbers are only useful for ad revenue purposes and shouldnt be used for even that but there isnt a better system...yet. there is one in R&D righ now and in 5ish years we will finally have good data if all goes well.



but again we have absolutely no idea how many viewers either show has. none. and neilson agrees.

neilson ratings are completely and totally fraudulent

should just pin those two posts at the top and close the thread :)

Having done no research on this top, I'll take your word for it. But I'll happily take your word for it, kind sir.

It’ll always be fun to rag on AEW fans because they take them so seriously though.

I’d like to introduce you to yourself, Noid.

i mean I'll engage in a conversation about ratings I'll just use the rules the person im speaking to has established. if x is good and y is bad even if i disagree with the metrics we can still have a conversation as long as we all have the same context.


but make no mistake those numbers are complete mickey mouse.

My issue has been solely that bad is bad, but worse than bad is somehow better and good.

right is 10 is bad for A and 6 is good for B i see why youd raise an eyebrow. HOWEVER in regards to AEW i think they have a pretty healthy growth over all. their youtube vide bring in large views which i think is indicative of interest.

if i were WWE id be concerend about 2032 and id be doubling my effort to reconnect with my audience.

if im AEW id feel optimistic about 2032. i would double down on efforts to iron out the NUMEROUS issues my company had to foster as much growth as rapidly as possible.

what im saying is there is a nuance here thats worth evaluating.

and to be clear im confident that there will be a wwe in 2032 than i am there will be an aew for a large number of reasons. like i said its a multifaceted issue.

The numbers relative to themselves make for interesting discussion. It just amazes me how 969k for one is considered great. 1.5 million for someone else is considered “a record low.”

People apply their own context to these things. They want what people who have sway want them to mean. People on the internet will say the craziest things though.

I’m pretty sure AEW is going to go under if it doesn’t get a major increase from WBD. I can see them getting it, because you can’t exactly accuse them of good taste.

But what about the demos?

I think there are other metrics which are more telling.

One of the bigger ones being the upfronts. Keep in mind one company had a major physical presence for the networks they were on, while the other barely had a slide or two.