If you happened to have a wrestling agency on nationwide television and worldwide pay-per-view, would you barely have a television show draw two million viewers, which on the current day might be a boffo amount, or would you barely have your quarterly, and even month-to-month, paid event draw a quarter-million buys? The reply, to me at least, is in the form of a clear You have to cultivate an enormous, reliable audience that may spend extra cash on you than frequent, that may be loyal to the lean cases, that may proselytize all through the nice ones. You want the hardcore fan’s faith first, after which use that base to try and entice casual followers who may pop in sporadically and artificially inflate the advertisement costs you’ll demand on television. The reply is the extreme number of PPV buys.
This reply shouldn’t be going to technique a consensus. For a really very long time up to now, over 20 years up to now to be precise, skilled wrestling was on television. Television was in a weird, nonetheless unsustainable time, when cable was widespread enough that nearly everyone throughout the nation had it, but not technologically advanced enough to have the intensive breadth of programming selections obtainable in the current day.
Therefore, the idea of playing to a television audience is antiquated. You get two million viewers for a piece, and chances are you’ll flex. Nonetheless, precise heads know it is best to get as many of these viewers to drop money on dwell event tickets, merchandise, and pay-per-view events. It mustn’t come as a shock, though, that people who cling to the idea that television rankings are king acquire right here and all through this improvement interval.
The consternation with Russo in 2021 is that his analysis often relies on the exact wrestling. He made it large in a time when televised wrestling was, by and large, a non-entity, and the creep of his ideas on what a wrestling match must be typically contaminated pay-per-view matches. It was heavy on the idea that people don’t care about the exact matches, nonetheless on “moments,” or being “entertained.”
The actuality of the matter is that no one sort of wrestling is a skeleton key. If it was, and the kind of AEW that Russo derides as “ALL WORKRATE, BRO” has occurred, it couldn’t be drawing the equivalent number of followers that it is. AEW has taken a following, plied it, and grown it by executing on what that genuine fanbase wanted, after which they proselytized to others, be they lapsed followers or non-fans altogether, trying to find one cool thing to get into.
They’re the followers you’re going have coming once more to you when you occur to make them blissful. Hell, judging by the return viewers of WWE, you’ll get people coming once more to you even when you occur to piss them off. It’s not each or, nonetheless it is plus. That’s what happens when your view sees all the picture. It’s what happens when your view shouldn’t be clouded because you took the Russo Pill.
