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Originally Posted by Observer
There are issues that are the same with many sports, in the sense that the key profit driver is television and due to that, because their shows still are among the highest rated on cable, and they are producing too many hours. That is the history of television with anything popular and one of the reasons many things burn out on television.
But even with the lowest ratings in history and so-so arena business, the television revenue is fixed and continues to rise, and as long as it does, the company will remain healthy ...
It’s a weird situation because the wrestling audience is constantly changing. The current audience is more into wrestling and will spend more on it than any audience before, but it’s also smaller and has a mind of its own.
It’s harder to control, hence the multi-year failure of making Roman Reigns into the face of the company.
The problem is, that is the only audience left. If it didn’t require so much time to keep up with wrestling, would there be more of a casual audience? Who knows, but they aren’t cutting back on the hours of programming. Would there be more fans if they concentrated more on the old vision of good looking larger-than-life stars as opposed to guys who grew up as Bret Hart, Mick Foley and Shawn Michaels fans and whose goal is to put on great matches or get over taking big bumps? There isn’t a Dwayne Johnson or a Steve Austin, but John Cena is becoming a crossover star and Brock Lesnar comes across as a legitimate tough guy as much as any wrestler from any time period, and the company pushed the two as its biggest stars. These are the flaws that get talked about regularly.
And things do vary, which tells us that stuff matters. House shows have gone down with John Cena out of the mix. Ratings were at rock bottom and this fall season was looking to be a disaster from that standpoint in September, but once Bill Goldberg came back and other things fell into place, things did improve. But even if that hadn’t have happened, the way the business is structured, things are still healthy, and will remain healthy as long as they can continually increase television revenue.
If streaming services get aggressive in wanting to compete with television years from now, WWE has a large enough and loyal enough fan base that if there becomes competition for their rights that business will only boom. If that doesn’t happen, and television stations have less revenue, who knows how WWE will fit into the picture.
In the end, it is these outside market forces that will tell the future of the WWE business, not short-term creative, and not Vince McMahon. As people like to point out, the WWE brand that gets the most consistently positive reaction is NXT, which has the fewest viewers and draws the least. Smackdown is more widely praised as a television show than Raw, but Raw does more viewers and draws more fans on the road. In the end, it’s not the creative or the television show quality but the perception of what is important, which is why nobody can compete with WWE, even if they were on national television and put on a better product, because even so, the perception would be it’s not as important.
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