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The excuses for AEW’s declining ratings are hilarious:
* The West Coast difference. Sure, this is thing that does impact live viewership. But that doesn’t explain why the ratings decrease week-to-week (outside TV specials). It also doesn’t address why AEW was put in this situation in the first place. Could it be Warner prioritises the value of other properties that make them more money?
* They’re building a loyal fan base before they expand. Yes, I’ve read this one recently. People are actually trying to praise Tony Khan for neglecting wrestling fans and instead going after the most hardcore of the hardcore. Never mind this “hardcore” fan base has been whittled away over time.
* They’re focusing on their international expansion. Have I missed something? I can find the announcement of a deal in Subsaharan Africa, India and the Philippines in 2021 — which are important markets, to speak nothing of the actual deals — but there hasn’t exactly been some groundbreaking movement in this area. I don’t know if they even have deals in Japan or Australia. Come on.
* They’re up year over year. Cool. This is true sometimes. December has seen lower viewership in 2021 than 2020 so far. This might not matter to TNT, but NXT was obviously a factor that AEW doesn’t have to deal with directly anymore. The number of people watching wrestling on a Wednesday has decreased. There hasn’t actually been any growth in popularity of AEW or wrestling overall. They’ve also had some MAJOR signings which helps them every now and then — CM Punk, Bryan Danielson — and that helps boost the data. But there hasn’t been an instance where AEW has been able to sustain those spikes for an extended period of time. Full Gear 2021 got a boost over Full Gear 2020. Cool.
I’m beyond the point of caring about whether or not AEW succeeds. I’ve been that way for a long time, because I’m not sympathetic to bad entries in a genre because I think they can hurt that genre. Some people are. That’s their prerogative. But I don’t think it is more “right” than my philosophy that the last thing wrestling fans is more bad wrestling. The best outcome I can see is a forest fire scenario, where the land is scorched and from it new life can grow. Short-term, I’m worried that anyone trying to sell wrestling to a network is going to be hit with the reality that it is not effective enough.
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