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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.
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