I swear WWEs target audience is its sponsors
 

Watching the video package they have on right now and their "DID YOU KNOW" facts just cater to them.

I wouldn't be surprised.

The target demographic for every show is sponsors.

Make no mistake if they could get ratings for a half hour block of commercials the networks would be in love.

Take any show you ever loved and realize that the network looks/looked at that show as a 21 minutes of garbage to get 9 minutes of precious precious advertizements.

I remember back in the late 1980's, early 1990's, commercials in between were like at least 2-3 minutes.

But you must agree that WWE has really stepped it up with letting their sponsors know how many people watch and who follows their twitter.

Oh of course, no doubt about that. The WWE focuses on their reputation, following, and past because they have nothing else going for them.

Can I ask a question about commercials in the US? It seems you have loads of commercial breaks (this is especially obvious when I watch NFL), could someone inform me as to the length of each of these commercial breaks? Is it 1 minute, 5 minutes, longer?

sports: 2 minutes
Wrestling/regular shows around 5 minutes

To be fair, few shows offer as little pretense as WWE programming.

:yes:

1 commercial is basically 1 minute.

In the US an hour-long primetime show features 40-42 minutes of programming and 18-20 minutes of commercials. There are typically 6 or 7 2-minute breaks and 1 4-minute break around the half-hour. There is also a 2-4 minute break at the top of the hour between shows.

Over here (Denmark) last I checked - 10-ish years ago - it was actually illegal for commercials to be more than 12 minutes of every hour. Unfortunately some of our channels (ones in Danish language) are broadcast from the UK circumventing it, crafty buggers. But usually we get 6 breaks an hour at most, usually only 4 - once every 15 minutes. Not sure how long they are, cause I usually start zapping and then forget what I was watching, but something like 2-3 minutes a piece if I had to guess, varying for different times of the day obviously :)

Oh and on topic: The WWE do cater greatly to the sponsors, however not always with sublime success. Do you remember when there was a "commercial-free" RAW episode sponsored by KFC - the Kentucky Grilled Chicken was coming out. It was the one where Vince had to buy back RAW from Trump. Lawler had a giant bucket of their new super delicious, tasty to the max Kentucky Grilled Chicken at the commentator's desk.
There was one person throughout the entire episode that actually ate any of it (My memory says JR or CM punk for some reason)... It just struck me as the worst advertisement possible! "New Kentucky Grilled Chicken - it's so disgusting we can't even pay people to eat it!"

Didn't they also have basically a giant Subway ad by having a backstage setup with the Subway logo and a shitload of sandwiches in that show?

Of course their target audience is sponsors. They work together to make money.

I remember not too long ago there were no commercials in the middle of matches

Courting the sponsors as directly as WWE does is not the standard model, nor is it necessarily wise.

Anyone who says "of course their target audience is sponsors" is grossly missing the point.

I remember watching Smackdown, and at times a whole match would go on, end and another match was about to start when they finally went to a commercial break.