AEW/ROH Finances, Ratings, etc.

[odessasteps]

18 minutes ago, Curt McGirt said:

I'm reading a book about an attempted assassination of Margaret Thatcher by the IRA and they had a trial run over a Bank Holiday Weekend. Now I'm imagining them doing it during an All In.

Who would they be trying to assassinate at All In? So many possibilities.

[Raziel]

24 minutes ago, JLowe said:

I mean, what is more important to a business, the number of tickets sold or papering thousands of people to fill the stands?

I mean, at the end of the day, Sold is more important.  You buy the tickets, they have the money whether you show up or not (unless you're a moron and astroturfed the numbers buying it all yourself, which obviously Tony did NOT do.).   

[Curt McGirt]

Who would be a British Protestant heel in the fed? I mean in the E you got Wade Barrett right there. 

EDIT: You even have Devitt who could be a hardline Northern Irish Protestant who hates the Papist horde to the south

Edited September 14, 2023 by Curt McGirt

[Godfrey]

Is there any way to see if there were still seats available on the secondary market right up to bell time?

[Stefanie Sparkleface]

Unused, sold tickets are more common than you think. Brokers buying tickets in bulk for travel packages that don't sell through, giving tickets away to sponsors/resellers and counting them as "sold" because they're no longer part of the economy, companies purchasing tickets to use for giveaways that the recipients don't use, those are all sold tickets that don't see the holders go through the turnstiles. Then you have the direct buyers that buy tickets and for whatever reason don't go through. Family emergency, kid got sick, car broke down, mass transit issue, passport issue, whatever. It happens.

I have no doubts they legitimately moved that many tickets, but how those tickets were counted is basically picking nits. If the turnstile count is within 85-90% of your ticket distribution, you did pretty good.

[odessasteps]

A lot of us grew up in the era where  the local TV station or sponsor would buy tickets to lift that weeks potential NFL blackout. 

[Godfrey]

31 minutes ago, Sparkleface said:

Unused, sold tickets are more common than you think. Brokers buying tickets in bulk for travel packages that don't sell through, giving tickets away to sponsors/resellers and counting them as "sold" because they're no longer part of the economy, companies purchasing tickets to use for giveaways that the recipients don't use, those are all sold tickets that don't see the holders go through the turnstiles. Then you have the direct buyers that buy tickets and for whatever reason don't go through. Family emergency, kid got sick, car broke down, mass transit issue, passport issue, whatever. It happens.

I have no doubts they legitimately moved that many tickets, but how those tickets were counted is basically picking nits. If the turnstile count is within 85-90% of your ticket distribution, you did pretty good.

I'll take your word for it but almost 11000 seats doesn't seem like picking nits to me, that's more than the attendance at most other AEW shows

[Cobra Commander]

1 hour ago, Curt McGirt said:

Who would be a British Protestant heel in the fed? I mean in the E you got Wade Barrett right there. 

Time for a bidding war to determine which org pushes Orange Order Zack Sabre Jr (which might be a funnier idea considering ZSJ’s publicly known convictions)

[Stefanie Sparkleface]

54 minutes ago, Godfrey said:

I'll take your word for it but almost 11000 seats doesn't seem like picking nits to me, that's more than the attendance at most other AEW shows

When you get into audience sizes of that scale, it is. Heck, most professional football games will announce "sellouts" but the turnstile count will be half of what the sold ticket amount was, because of season tickets or giveaways not being used. The Washington football team had a 50 year "sellout" streak and there was a point where you could get seats for their games for $10 on the reseller market practically anywhere in the building because nobody was going to their games.

Take a look up thread at the original article and you'll note it states most AEW events have their ticket usage around 80-90%. So if they sell out a 5,000 seat building, their average event is going to end up with 4,000-4,500 in the building. All In just scaled up their usual ticket usage ratio - rather well, actually! Tbh, when they announced 81,035 as their attendance, I expected a larger drop rate and the turnstile count to be more along the lines of 65,000, because the drop rates get bigger for larger crowds. The promoter is always going to announce the larger number, and that larger number is always going to be tickets sold.

Edited September 14, 2023 by Sparkleface

[odessasteps]

I think it was Al Getz who was discussing when promoters would announce a house lower than the actual attendance and was usually either for tax/state commission reasons or to save on what they paid the boys. If you are paying the guys 30% based on the house, tell them it was 4,000 when it was really 5,000 and you pocket the difference. 

[Stefanie Sparkleface]

17 minutes ago, odessasteps said:

I think it was Al Getz who was discussing when promoters would announce a house lower than the actual attendance and was usually either for tax/state commission reasons or to save on what they paid the boys. If you are paying the guys 30% based on the house, tell them it was 4,000 when it was really 5,000 and you pocket the difference. 

Well sure, but does anyone pay on the house anymore?

[sabremike]

9 hours ago, Curt McGirt said:

Who would be a British Protestant heel in the fed? I mean in the E you got Wade Barrett right there. 

EDIT: You even have Devitt who could be a hardline Northern Irish Protestant who hates the Papist horde to the south

Drew MacIntyre supports THEM (aka SEVCO), so there you go...

[AxB]

9 hours ago, Curt McGirt said:

Who would be a British Protestant heel in the fed? I mean in the E you got Wade Barrett right there. 

EDIT: You even have Devitt who could be a hardline Northern Irish Protestant who hates the Papist horde to the south

Devitt's from the Republic though. Your Northern Ireland representatives would be the Finlay family. Who haven't actually stated their religious affiliation, but most people are assuming they're Proddies because they're from Carrickfergus.

 

[Curt McGirt]

2 hours ago, sabremike said:

Drew MacIntyre supports THEM (aka SEVCO), so there you go...

I haven't the slightest what that is. Google is telling me a security operation? 

I'm just digging into the history of this conflict so you have to forgive some ignorance on my part.

[Dog]

Edited September 15, 2023 by Dog

[sabremike]

5 minutes ago, Curt McGirt said:

I haven't the slightest what that is. Google is telling me a security operation? 

I'm just digging into the history of this conflict so you have to forgive some ignorance on my part.

It is the derisive name us Celtic supporters have for Rangers. They went bust due to financial improprieties in 2012 and was reformed with the LLC name of Sevco. Celtic= Irish Catholic, Rangers= Protestant Unionists, essentially the Irish Question playing itself out in Scotland. It is among the most violent and heated sporting rivalries on the planet. Google "Old Firm" for the whole story in more detail.

[Curt McGirt]

I'm already reading about bombings and now you want me to read about football rivalries, I mean I'm pretty numb to violence but that's asking a bit much 

[sabremike]

5 minutes ago, Curt McGirt said:

I'm already reading about bombings and now you want me to read about football rivalries, I mean I'm pretty numb to violence but that's asking a bit much 

The (in)famous 90's zine Murder Can Be Fun actually did an in depth article on this in the "I Hate Sports" issue.

[Curt McGirt]

Good lord. I would love to read these. 

Spoiler

EDIT: Found it, and it's not the I Hate Sports issue, it's the one above https://archive.org/details/murder-can-be-fun-18

Edited September 15, 2023 by Curt McGirt

[Curt McGirt]

It's pretty serendipitous that you hipped me to that mag and I just got in the mail today a tape copy of Dead Infection's A Chapter of Accidents (investigate at your own risk. Disgusting cover, highly disturbing lyrics). One of the songs should have been written about the Glass Factory Tragedy in that issue. Just imagine if the vats weren't covered...

[JLowe]

12 hours ago, sabremike said:

The (in)famous 90's zine Murder Can Be Fun actually did an in depth article on this in the "I Hate Sports" issue.

wow, first one of my friends posts a meme about rotten.com and then a Murder Can Be Fun reference. 

[Niners Fan in CT]

Thanks guys,  this was actually a sane conversation about the ticket "controversy" for All In.   There's parts of Twitter where all I'm seeing is "TONY KHAN LIED!" it's pathetic that so many people have that much time on their hands to be picking sides in some nonexistent wrestling fed war. 

[Stefanie Sparkleface]

54 minutes ago, Niners Fan in CT said:

Thanks guys,  this was actually a sane conversation about the ticket "controversy" for All In.   There's parts of Twitter where all I'm seeing is "TONY KHAN LIED!" it's pathetic that so many people have that much time on their hands to be picking sides in some nonexistent wrestling fed war. 

I can get why folks would think unused, sold tickets would be weird. I thought it was weird until I got into higher scale event production and saw we had hundreds of tickets be sold but not used and I was like "uh... do we still get their money?"

(For the record, we did!)

I wish I could say I was surprised by certain corners jumping straight to malice, but alas, the internet choosing the worst option seems to be what it does anymore.

[Godfrey]

I dunno, making the claim it was the highest attendance ever and it turned out to be short by 10,000 can be disappointing if you think TK won’t “lie” (work) like WWE does, and it’s easy to see a through-line with the flagging attendance State-side even if the two are unrelated. That’s why I was asking if there was some way of confirming how many tickets were on the secondary market at bell time, it would put a discussion like this to rest for the Twitter reaction crowd

[Stefanie Sparkleface]

40 minutes ago, Godfrey said:

I dunno, making the claim it was the highest attendance ever and it turned out to be short by 10,000 can be disappointing if you think TK won’t “lie” (work) like WWE does, and it’s easy to see a through-line with the flagging attendance State-side even if the two are unrelated. That’s why I was asking if there was some way of confirming how many tickets were on the secondary market at bell time, it would put a discussion like this to rest for the Twitter reaction crowd

Would it? Or would they just move on to reacting to something else?

So let's do the math. AEW's normal ticket usage rate is between 80-90%. Supposing that 81,035 is the legitimate number of tickets moved, we know that 72,265 people went through the turnstiles at Wembley. At that point, that's a ticket usage rate of 89.18%, which is well within their usual range. Whether or not it's confirmed that the 8,770 tickets that were unused were on the secondary market, they still performed within where they usually perform.

I think the reason people are hung up on the unsold ticket usage is because it's a relatively larger number and people are, as I said, looking to pick at nits. After all, nearly 9,000 tickets is nothing to sneeze at until you look at the actual usage rate and see it's within normal usage. I think your real question isn't so much were they on the secondary market, but what kind of tickets were they (meaning were they giveaways, sponsor comps, what position in the seating chart were they, et cetera). Even if they were all on the secondary market, though, I'm not sure what it solves because people still get hung up on the amount of unused tickets and proclaim TONY LIED!

Fun(?) caveat - for events these big, there are people who double dip on tickets by buying the cheapest possible ticket but then hitting the secondary market and getting a better seat at a cheaper price from someone who can no longer attend, because the double dip would still work out better price-wise than if they had bought the better seat at the initial value. At that point, that's two tickets sold but one usage, since the person almost always can't resell the cheaper ticket so it goes unused. There's all sorts of situations like this. It's only when you have a super-hot ticket with genuine sellouts that you have close to true 100% ticket usage, but you almost never see those in stadiums.

WWE has this happen to them too. Pretty much every large scale event promoter does. It is what it is, basically. People will debate it to the end of time. People still debate WrestleMania III's attendance! We avoid them at parties.