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Originally Posted by Emperor Smeat
Yes to a certain degree and mainly in terms of it being a useful way of tracking how wrestling is both doing and heading for the short and long term.
Like almost all of WWE's current woes with ratings can be traced back to their utter failure to turn Cena's young fans into their future new core for TV. The lack of a real "Next Gen" era also didn't help. NXT failing to be that "Next Gen" isn't helping either.
In regards to AEW, I find this stuff a lot more interesting since not only do you get to witness a new wrestling company its early beginnings, the ratings and viewership will help reveal if a next wrestling boom is even possible. The last one only really happened because wrestling managed to get very popular with younger people and an outside company was strong enough to seriously challenge and force WWE to actually change for the better.
I don't really blame Meltzer for the craziness that has become ratings talk online since it just ended up being a microcosm of how social media and the internet has gotten worse or toxic over time for quality discussion. He mentioned before that the only reason he stopped doing detailed ratings stuff after the Attitude Era ended was due to him getting bored over the lack of a notable wrestling war and AEW vs. NXT reigniting that passion he once had for it. He does go a bit overboard with it at times, especially whenever he starts overanalyzing things instead of keeping it simple. All that does is give more ammo for added ridicule and scorn by people who already hate him for various reasons.
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I stopped reading when I got to the the part where you use the ratings to make a blanket statement in regards to the narrative you want to push. Raw is a three-hour show now. But no, it’s got to be that Cena fans weren’t lifers? How simplistic is that?
Ratings still matter insofar as they are made to matter. If the USA Network heads care about them — they matter. But as a measuring tool they’re so archaic. Nielsen themselves states there is a 10% margin of error, since this is all guess work and estimates. And what if a kid watches Raw at his grandparents’ house because they’re the only old fucks with cable they know? They get counted as those “undesirables” that Tony Khan shits on.
What matters is how important you are to a network’s bottom-line. Meltzer has pumped significance into the ratings by presenting them as power levels to a nerdy and obsessive audience. He always has a story of the week then. Raw is falling, SmackDown disappointing, AEW soaring. It’s like if I put out an an environmental newsletter and supplemented my stories with a section about how many birds I saw on my walk re: the health of bird populations.