Wrestling is in trouble. WWE is in trouble. You need to take off your $9.99-colored glasses and look at how bad the product is. If you do, maybe they will.
Or maybe they won’t.
WWE is being run by a woman who has no pedigree beyond blood, a man whose primary qualification is marrying well, and a 69-year-old man who is clearly fading. And if he isn’t fading, why is he almost never on TV?
Everything is cookie-cutter, from the training center all the way up the ladder to Sunday Night Raw. WWE doesn’t trust its talent enough to let it bring out the best in itself. With few exceptions, everyone has a .500 record. No one is special. Everything is overly scripted. Like Bruce Mitchell of PWTorch.com said, it’s the mid-card era. Everyone is in the mid-card. No one breaks away from the pack.
The storylines and matches are absolutely crippled by PG-13. The “Attitude” era numbed the audience. The genie can’t be put back in the bottle. Star power compensated for a long time. But now, WWE doesn’t have enough star power.
Titles mean zero. Brock Lesnar’s prolonged absence isn’t helping. It eliminates the WWE belt and WWE’s biggest star from TV in the name of thrift. I said it wouldn’t hurt if Lesnar wasn’t on TV each week. But I didn’t think he’d go into witness protection.
Wrestling is in trouble. WWE is in trouble.
But don’t believe me. Believe the numbers. And let me preface the numbers by saying, money is the only measure of success for wrestling. Always has been. Always will be. Is the WWE product drawing enough money? Is the potential even there?
Perhaps the elimination of PPV income for the talent is a clue. They have a meeting about that yet? Perhaps all the cost-cutting is a clue.
WWE Network has 731,000 subscribers. The break-even point has been listed at anywhere from 1 million to 1.3 million. Now, after cost-cutting, that number might be down to 900,000. WWE is now offering temporary Network access for free. You never give away what you can sell. But what if you can’t sell it?
Raw drew over 4,000,000 viewers this week, up eight percent from last week and Raw’s best number since Aug. 18. But Raw did an 8.1 rating in 1999. No one expects that, not ever again. But the disturbing fact remains: More people used to watch wrestling than currently watch wrestling. That can’t be emphasized enough.
House-show business is way down: 4,000-6,000 in most places. A Smackdown taping in Houston – a strong WWE town – drew only 7,000.
WWE finds ways to excuse failure, and to “logically” theorize that light is at the end of the tunnel. We did that all the time at WCW. Got really good at it. Until WCW went out of business. Nothing about WWE is legit trending upward.
How do you solve the problem? Putting together a better product is the only way. But WWE has no intention of doing that. WWE thinks the current product is fine despite all signs pointing to the contrary. WWE embraces the monopoly.
So, instead, WWE will continue cutting payroll. Obviously. For those who still hang onto the canard that I would KILL to work in wrestling again, know this: My radio salary is a LOT MORE than the majority of WWE personnel makes. Entry-level performers are paid at a shameful level.
WWE may tweak the Network’s content. More live programming. More original programming. The Network could go from limited advertising to ad saturation.
