Partial Source: The Wrestling Observer Newsletter
Company sources say that Vince McMahon has admitted in private that the company is running to many pay-per-views. The expectation is they will cut back from 15 to 14 in 2008, although which PPV that gets dropped has not been decided on. The most likely candidates are One Night Stand, Cyber Sunday or New Year’s Revolution.
Early estimates pegged WrestleMania 23 at doing 1,200,000 buys, an all-time record for the company on pay-per-view. It is now figured at having done 1,175,000 buys and 750,000 domestic buys, so we’re looking at 1,925,000 buys alltogether, nearly 2 million.
There is more and more negative sentiment regarding the ‘Jackass’ idea at SummerSlam. Triple H wants none of the top stars to have anything to do with them. There is also a push to limit their involvement to one match instead of the proposed three.
The 6/2 Saturday Night’s Main Event actually show did a 1.78 rating, not a 2.2 like previously reported. The show drew 2.72 million viewers. The show did beat out the Stanley Cup Finals, which did a 1.1 rating. The number for SNME would still have to be considered bad as the average summer rerun of SNL does a 2.8 rating, costs no extra money (NBC pays WWE for the show), and NBC can sell ads for triple the amount in comparison to pro wrestling. Cena’s match with Khali started out with a 2.7 rating, but the show lost 22% of its audience (918,000) within the first ten minutes. The ratings continued to fall, but with a late night show, that’s to be expected, but no other segment had that enormous of a drop. The Finlay & Hornswoggle vs. Boogeyman & Little Boogeyman match lost 450,000 viewers. The last half hour of the show was at the 1.4 level.
