Chris Jericho believes social media’s influence is overblown and it should be taken in stride.
During a San Diego Comic-Con roundtable interview that included Skewed and Reviewed Gareth Von Kallenbach, Chris Jericho was asked how much he pays attention to reactions on social media. Jericho said that it’s the fans’ opinion, but his is the one that matters and it should all be taken with a grain of salt.
“It’s their opinion, and I also think the influence of social media is overrated. I think it’s overblown, and I’ll tell you the reason why. I have over four million followers on Instagram, 4.2 to be exact. If I post a video or a picture and it gets 10,000 views or over, that’s a lot. If it gets 100,000, that’s pretty rare. Think about that. 100,00 out of four million is not a lot, when you look at the follower accounts that you have. Same thing with Twitter. If you post something, a match, a song, a promo, whatever, if you got 100 tweets about one thing, that would be amazing and huge.
“You trend on Twitter with 2,000 tweets. I’ve got four million followers on Twitter. That’s nothing. So I think you gotta take it all with a grain of salt. There’s people on Twitter who think I’m the greatest ever, and there’s people on Twitter who wish I would crawl into a hole and never be seen again. You can’t worry about it either way, you gotta take it with a grain of salt. Everybody has an opinion, and that’s fine. Only my opinion matters.”
Jericho went on to agree that it’s definitely harder to hook younger fans now, but that’s the way the world has changed and he believes AEW is up for the challenge.
“I mean absolutely, and that’s why I started calling myself ‘The Demo God’ a couple years ago, and it was true. At the time, even now, AEW demos are huge. That’s why we’ve been number one on cable for the last six weeks in a row for our night, even though the viewership is not as much as Tucker Carlson, right. The viewership of Tucker Carlson is three million, viewership of AEW is one million, but we’ll finish number one because the demos are high. The demo is the age group of people watching, and the most important age group is 18-49 and 18-34. We’re doing very well with that demo because we’re hooking the younger people. Because you can’t dismiss the cool factor. AEW is the cool wrestling company, and that is huge for young people. And you’re right because they have shorter attention fans. A lot of younger kids don’t even watch TV. They don’t. My kids don’t. They watch their phones, they watch Netflix, they watch streaming.
“So that’s another challenge, too. But then we’ll put something up for example, on our TV show, on Dynamite. Let’s say we do a million viewers. Okay great. Well then I posted something from the match that did a million viewers, and I think between YouTube and Instagram, I think it’s already at two million. So people are watching, and they’re consuming in different ways, and it all counts. So once our show airs, then we delegate and fragment the show, put in YouTube, put it up on TikTok, put it up on Reel, and then people are watching it from that as well. So you’ll always get, ‘Did you see Dynamite?’ ‘No but I saw parts of it.’ And those are the parts [of the people] that consume their AEW, that’s how they do it. That’s just the way of the world now.”
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