AEW/ROH Finances, Ratings, etc.

[Stefanie Sparkleface]

5 hours ago, Kevin Wilson said:

That's kinda true but EagleBank seats 10K (probably 8K with a wrestling setup) so even with the opening of a few sections they were around 4.5K. They released more tickets but they had under 4K originally released.  There was still very large sections empty. I was glad with the attendance all things considered but I guess the question would be would the promotion rather legit sell out a 4K arena, or 60% fill a 8K arena. And the answer seems to be the latter but I can see the argument that occasionally doing a smaller arena and selling it out would be nice for TV and doing the "full" scan of the place, and being able to yell on commentary all night that its sold out.

It depends on the return on investment that they get, as well as the amount of seats they have do to production kills on (set, camera setup, et cetera). Sometimes the 8,000 seat building, with production kills, configuration, and setup, is the bigger profit generator than the 4,000 seat building because the rent is cheaper. It's also going to depend on the market. If you feel you can get 5,000 in the building and you can get that ROI on the 8,000 seater, it's better to run that than the 4,000 seat building and leave the secondary market open for scalpers where you're not going to get a sniff of that money anyway. This is especially the case in a market you're not hitting more than twice a year anyway; better to get as many people in the building if you can than have people miss out and be disappointed so they're not interested when you come back.

Are the optics better on a full building? Sure. But the name of the game is to make more money, and if people are influenced to not go to a show because they saw a half-full building on TV or in pictures, they were looking for a reason not to go anyway.

[Stefanie Sparkleface]

With regard to the actual rating, I will go back to my standard talking points:

1) Live ratings are going down around the board, and will continue to go down as cable continues to die. The streaming TV providers, like YouTube TV and Hulu Live TV, are starting to lose subscribers in large amounts too. I saw an article the other day that YouTube TV lost subscribers for the first time in 2024, I believe somewhere in the neighborhood of 100k subscribers. That's a drop in the bucket, but the market is going to shrink. This is why AEW's next U.S. deal absolutely needs a streaming platform to go along with it.

2) Nothing is really appointment TV anymore outside of live sports. This is why I'm annoyed that only same day numbers get reported, and nobody goes back for live+3s or live+7s. A lot of people do watch via DVR or on demand. This week is the first week after school for a significant amount of school areas and families were taking vacations. TV is just not a priority. Losing a third of your audience isn't a "something better was on", it was a "we're not watching TV at all" moment.

3) AEW really does need to do more to connect with a wider net of audiences. They have been doing a better job with angles lately, so they get credit there, but most things with angles/storylines need months to pay off to draw people in to show that there will be consistency. I think if they keep it up for six months, that will be a big help. I don't think Tony Khan saying "I'm booking for the sickos" does them any favors. I do think if they borrowed from NXT and focused on women more, that would help; women's sports are a hot topic now, and NXT have seen their ratings and interest go up by focusing on the women. (Something I've been saying for what... five years? lol)

[Octopus]

I didn’t watch AEW on Juneteenth out of respect for Big Swole.

Other than that, I think everyone is mad that the Forbidden Door AEW title match isn’t an inter-promotional match.

[tbarrie]

20 minutes ago, Octopus said:

Other than that, I think everyone is mad that the Forbidden Door AEW title match isn’t an inter-promotional match.

...I'm a little mad about that, and I don't even watch NJPW.

[Cobra Commander]

8 hours ago, AxB said:

The thing about the "Large building, half full" talking point is, on Wednesday the building was full and they opened up (and sold out) a bunch of sections on the hard cam side. 

Adding that to a list of factors that drove the rating down even if they didn’t draw 180000 fans for that episode of Dynamite

[Niners Fan in CT]

7 hours ago, TheVileOne said:

AEW is suffering from things that a group of good shows and a PPV with some five star matches isn’t going to be able to fix.

I think a string of good shows does help ratings but that string has to be for more than a month or two.   We just saw this with WWE.  This whole "Bloodline Saga" had been going on for a couple of years before the massive spike in attendance. The people coming back to WWE are the much discussed "casual fans" that were always out there.  

But that's also the top promotion.  WWE can afford to piss off the casuals because they have the name value to be able to get them back.   It's harder for a secondary promotion to get people excited again.  

[COLETTI]

58 minutes ago, Octopus said:

Other than that, I think everyone is mad that the Forbidden Door AEW title match isn’t an inter-promotional match.

Eh, if it was, the end result wouldn't be in much question, would it? At least this way, there's some intrigue. Definitely far from Sanada vs Perry...

[tbarrie]

6 minutes ago, Coletti said:

Eh, if it was, the end result wouldn't be in much question, would it? At least this way, there's some intrigue.

That's a fair point, but Jon Moxley winning the IWGP title helped some, I think. If NJPW is willing to put their top title on an AEW guy, why mightn't AEW give a top Japanese star a run with their world title?

[COLETTI]

18 minutes ago, tbarrie said:

That's a fair point, but Jon Moxley winning the IWGP title helped some, I think. If NJPW is willing to put their top title on an AEW guy, why mightn't AEW give a top Japanese star a run with their world title?

Honestly, even though he's looking pretty rough these days, I was hoping they would belt up Tanahashi that one time, even if just to have him in the lineage, you know?

[Octopus]

1 hour ago, Coletti said:

Eh, if it was, the end result wouldn't be in much question, would it? At least this way, there's some intrigue. Definitely far from Sanada vs Perry...

Partially agree with you. Even with the past events having weaker builds and maybe less big name NJPW possibilities, the concept and event itself has been very fun in the past. I’d rather see or have build for Swerve vs Osprey than most other match possibilities, but they found a way, as silly as it is, for my heart to not be in it. 
—-

Also, I was joking relating it to the ratings. That was just a dumb me joke. 

[TheVileOne]

Let's say Ricochet goes to AEW now. What is Ricochet going to do for AEW right now that Okada, Mercedes Mone, and Will Ospreay haven't been able to do? On a roster where they have 20 other younger guys just like Ricochet, many who aren't even getting booked. 

Tony Khan hired more people than he can handle, refuses to cut them and then just dumps them all in ROH when he loses interest in them, so they can continue collecting paychecks.

[porksweats]

Just now, TheVileOne said:

Let's say Ricochet goes to AEW now. What is Ricochet going to do for AEW right now that Okada, Mercedes Mone, and Will Ospreay haven't been able to do? On a roster where they have 20 other younger guys just like Ricochet, many who aren't even getting booked. 

Tony Khan hired more people than he can handle, refuses to cut them and then just dumps them all in ROH when he loses interest in them, so they can continue collecting paychecks.

We don't always agree Vile but you really have got a point about a Ricochet signing. 

[just drew]

I really think some of yall are underestimating the Juneteenth factor. I know several places here in GA had evening parades, fireworks, etc. A LOT of people who fit the socio-economic profile of potential AEW viewers were out and about when they normally wouldn't be, especially in the Southern United States. Plus, AEW still finished 3rd on the evening, which leads me to believe that no one watched much of anything Wednesday night. 

 

I didn't watch the Kendrick Lamar concert, but I would have if I'd known about it. Was it free?

[TheVileOne]

1 minute ago, Just Dave said:

I really think some of yall are underestimating the Juneteenth factor. I know several places here in GA had evening parades, fireworks, etc. A LOT of people who fit the socio-economic profile of potential AEW viewers were out and about when they normally wouldn't be, especially in the Southern United States. Plus, AEW still finished 3rd on the evening, which leads me to believe that no one watched much of anything Wednesday night. 

 

I didn't watch the Kendrick Lamar concert, but I would have if I'd known about it. Was it free?

IMHO this goes beyond just one bad rating, anomaly or not. Dave Meltzer is saying Juneteenth had nothing to do with it:

https://x.com/davemeltzerWON/status/1804205342596960475

To me, this goes back to things like airing the security footage of CM Punk on Dynamite.

[just drew]

I respect Dave's opinion on a lot of things. I'm not sure I trust him to have any real feel for what's "popping on the streets," as Dave Chappelle as Nelson Mandela would say.

I don't think you're totally wrong. Mistakes have been made. I've been saying for two years that having the Young Bucks as a focal part of your weekly TV show is a mistake. I think there's a big enough sample size now that you can say that pretty definitively. The thing I keep coming back to, however, is that nothing else on TV last night did anything either. If they don't have a strong bounce-back over the next few weeks, then I'll believe even more that it's a content issue...

[NikoBaltimore]

7 hours ago, Stefanie Sparkleface said:

The streaming TV providers, like YouTube TV and Hulu Live TV, are starting to lose subscribers in large amounts too. I saw an article the other day that YouTube TV lost subscribers for the first time in 2024, I believe somewhere in the neighborhood of 100k subscribers. That's a drop in the bucket, but the market is going to shrink. This is why AEW's next U.S. deal absolutely needs a streaming platform to go along with it.

I dropped YTTV in March to save money and it was almost stressful thinking how to watch certain things. But it worked out and thank goodness for AEW+ on Triller. It's just too expensive to keep paying for it. 

 

5 hours ago, Octopus said:

I didn’t watch AEW on Juneteenth out of respect for Big Swole.

Shit, I forgot about Swole and kind of feel bad I didn't do the same. 

[NoFistsJustFlips]

There's no one definitive reason AEW is down right now. There's about 10 or so things adding up to negative momentum for them. In the same respects, there's no quick fix to get the momentum back. They need about 5-10 things to turn around and break right for them to start reversing the momentum. The perfect height / sweet spot for them was August of 2021. Punk came in. Danielson & Cole jumped. AEW felt hot. It felt important. People were fed up with Vince's WWE. But from that point on just a bunch of things broke wrong for them. And the inertia just hasn't stopped.

It's still great that it exists. I still prefer it to WWE personally. You're bound to see at least 1-2 legitimately great matches a week. But's not the same as it was a few years ago. Injuries, the backstage dramas, the stigma of both Punk & Cody leaving, content saturation, booking and hiring proclivities. There's a lot working against them right now. I think the smartest course of action is to come up with a new game plan. What's happening in the now is making you money still. But there are warning signs. If you stay the current course you're about to have a WWE in 93-96 / WCW in 99-01 rut hit at any moment.

There needs to be shake ups in format and roster construction and live event routing strategies. They made a big hoopla about rankings coming back and how Punk was the one that kind of scuttled them away. And that lasted TWO WEEKS before it was dropped again. You have to sit down and make a game plan and stick to it. There needs to be some commitment. Decide what can be improved. Decide how it can be improved. Then give it time to improve. A month of good shows doesn't change anything. You need about 9 months to a full year of consistency before you can expect to really see the results.

Just my thoughts anyway. I personally just think this weeks's rating is an outlier. The TV universe is shrinking. Stuff was happening. Forbidden Door is always a killer show but the build is usually pretty bland. It's not a panic decision based off of that. It's just a feel based off of the product and attendances since Punk left. Or more accurately since Collision started really.

[Niners Fan in CT]

Amazon Prime reported record viewership for "The Pop Out" with Kendrick Lamar & Friends.  I wouldn't have missed that if WrestleMania or All In were on.  It was a huge once in a lifetime concert.  It also was streamed elsewhere on platforms like Twitch and other social media locations.  

Do I think it hurt AEW?  Yes, I do.  I think the holiday in general hurt it as well.   It reminds me of when RAW would get obliterated on a holiday.  I think Meltzer is wrong and the rating jumps back up next week. 

But they have had an overall decline this year as well.  They've been doing between 650K-780K lately.  That's down over 100K or more since last year. But 502K is by far the lowest and it's not particularly close so it's likely the holiday and other factors. 

[Stefanie Sparkleface]

19 minutes ago, NoFistsJustFlips said:

There's no one definitive reason AEW is down right now. There's about 10 or so things adding up to negative momentum for them. In the same respects, there's no quick fix to get the momentum back. They need about 5-10 things to turn around and break right for them to start reversing the momentum. The perfect height / sweet spot for them was August of 2021. Punk came in. Danielson & Cole jumped. AEW felt hot. It felt important. People were fed up with Vince's WWE. But from that point on just a bunch of things broke wrong for them. And the inertia just hasn't stopped.

It's still great that it exists. I still prefer it to WWE personally. You're bound to see at least 1-2 legitimately great matches a week. But's not the same as it was a few years ago. Injuries, the backstage dramas, the stigma of both Punk & Cody leaving, content saturation, booking and hiring proclivities. There's a lot working against them right now. I think the smartest course of action is to come up with a new game plan. What's happening in the now is making you money still. But there are warning signs. If you stay the current course you're about to have a WWE in 93-96 / WCW in 99-01 rut hit at any moment.

There needs to be shake ups in format and roster construction and live event routing strategies. They made a big hoopla about rankings coming back and how Punk was the one that kind of scuttled them away. And that lasted TWO WEEKS before it was dropped again. You have to sit down and make a game plan and stick to it. There needs to be some commitment. Decide what can be improved. Decide how it can be improved. Then give it time to improve. A month of good shows doesn't change anything. You need about 9 months to a full year of consistency before you can expect to really see the results.

Just my thoughts anyway. I personally just think this weeks's rating is an outlier. The TV universe is shrinking. Stuff was happening. Forbidden Door is always a killer show but the build is usually pretty bland. It's not a panic decision based off of that. It's just a feel based off of the product and attendances since Punk left. Or more accurately since Collision started really.

I've been saying this for a while now whenever people use the "there are great matches" point, but great matches simply aren't enough. There needs to be a hook for people to want to come back. That means something that entices them to watch next week, every week, with consistency. I can go to YouTube and watch a great match in a vacuum any time I want. I don't have to set my reminder at 8:00pm every Wednesday for it.

The Attitude Era had absolutely dogshit wrestling, but people wanted to see if Stone Cold was going to take it to Vince, or what the Rock was going to say, or what the NWO was going to do, or if Sting, Lex Luger, and DDP could stop them. The actual in-ring matters as well, but you need characters people like and reasons to get behind them, and jerks for those likable guys to beat up, and there needs to be consistency behind it.

You can literally have both! You can have great in-ring and great characters! But there's an inordinate amount of focus on the in-ring and it's going to tank things.

[NoFistsJustFlips]

1000% agree with you. Everywhere that's ever been successful gets that way by getting characters super hot with their audience and putting those characters in stories people want to see play out. We all love great wrestling. But the audience for great wrestling is smaller than the audience for compelling storytelling. If you can combine the two you're golden. But you need to get someone hot. Like really hot. And then tell stories people want to see.

You have to do that in addition to getting the roster construction, show formatting, live event routing, and all that other stuff right too. It's really really hard to capture all that lightning in a bottle at once. In a lot of ways I don't think WCW gets enough credit for their hot period with how much they did right to flip the momentum during their apex. For that kind of lightning to strike twice is almost impossible. But especially so if you're gonna be stubborn and try and do it only for the "sickos" instead of the wider audience like it's been done in the US for the last 70+ years.

[JLowe]

They’ve given the ball to guys like MJF and Swerve when they were hot. Maybe Tony should’ve just told Danielson that he doesn’t care, Bryan is their biggest name going to win the belt and be the top guy for a while. He can have his sicko matches, and they’ll be more meaningful.

[TheVileOne]

For one thing, why is MJF wrestling Hechicero of all people at Forbidden Door? What about the Undisputed Kingdom? The guys who made his life hell and took his title away? Samoa Joe was party to that business of gaslighting MJF as well. Just seems like a random as-hell matchup.  Also considering the winner of the Owen Hart Cup gets a title shot, shouldn't he be eager for a slot in that tournament as well?

Another issue is how badly AEW runs the Battle of the Belts shows. They had quarterly primetime specials on TNT and they were always treated like total throwaway shows. They were never a big deal. 

[odessasteps]

It pretty much should guarantee MJF looking like a million bucks, if nothing else.

[TheVileOne]

3 minutes ago, odessasteps said:

It pretty much should guarantee MJF looking like a million bucks, if nothing else.

He looked like a million bucks last Wednesday on Dynamite on Rush which was more of a PPV quality matchup. There's no incentive or it-factor to watch MJF vs. Hechicero. There's no intrigue there. Rush probably should've been the PPV match and Hechicero should've probably been his return bout.

[odessasteps]

Depending on who you’ll talk to, there’s a reason the matches happened in the order they did.