As I’ve noted before, I am not a fan of analyzing ratings. They often bring about panic in times when panic isn’t warranted. That being said, the ratings right now are the lowest they’ve been since 1997, so that’s something to be concerned about, right? It’s widely reported that Vince McMahon overreacts to ratings, so it could spell trouble for CM Punk and Daniel Bryan as top guys. Our favorite wrestlers will be cast to the wayside for the status quo. Woe is us, right?
Well, while I can’t predict what WWE will do, while I can’t give any solace to people who desperately want to see Punk or Bryan or Zack Ryder or any other favorites keep their roles, I can say that the ratings shouldn’t matter for two reasons. The first reason is that the new coterie of main event wrestlers have just started to settle in. They need time to settle their roots and build a bigger audience than they already have. These wrestlers are already selling a lot of merchandise and getting crowds to react to them.
The other reason could be that ratings will never recover, that the next boom period isn’t reliant on getting high television numbers like they had in 1998. The first boom in the mid-’80s was predicated on pay-per-view, house shows and touring business. Yes, those vestiges still remained, even until today. But when the second boom came around, it had to come from somewhere different. That “somewhere” was from cable television.
After Raw and Nitro debuted, it took awhile for them to get their footing, but when the shows took off, they really took off. A lot of shows follow that kind of model, or something similar. Either they start off with high ratings, or they start off small but grow into their high audience numbers before invariably tailing off. However, the similarity is that the numbers tail off, they don’t stay high forever. All television shows have a shelf life, and even the most successful ones often don’t have the same audiences in their death throes, even planned death throes, as they do in the golden ages, obviously with some exceptions.
So, maybe wrestling is like most other TV shows. The talking point that WWE trumpets three or four times on every RAW telecast of it being the longest running show on cable television could be something that could work against it, assuming we compare it to actual TV shows. Of course, televised sport has stayed popular over time, but those sports keep reinventing themselves with new casts, new teams in power. In a way, wrestling could be construed as a sport-like telecast with the turnover in roster and the raw aspect of competition. Which brings us back to the original point, that this new team, this new cast needs time to find footing.
If the other option is true, if cable-televised wrestling is nearing its end and Raw has reached its baseline or its bottom-out point, then the ratings wouldn’t seem much to matter anymore, would they? I’m not that intelligent in the ways of what would work in business, so I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on where wrestling would need to go if the cable well is truly dried up.
That being said, their current stars are obviously popular, and the ones who hold the titles and who are being groomed to at least share the stage with the Cenas and Ortons of the world are getting great reactions in front of the test audiences they attract in each city. Ratings, as always, don’t tell the whole story, and a guy like Vince McMahon, a guy who used to have the most business savvy of any promoter in professional wrestling, would be wise to see things that way.
TH writes The Wrestling Blog and broadcasts The Wrestling Podcast. You can find him on Twitter, or at various other spots around the Internet. He also loves Chikara, and quite frankly, thinks you should too.
Edited by Jason Mann.
