Post by This Player Hating Mothman on Sept 11, 2015 13:53:15 GMT -5
They don't make money because advertisers don't want to advertise during TNA. TNA was on the do not advertise list for a lot of advertisers. DA can sell ad space for stuff like Hunting Bigfoot, Monster and Mysteries in America, BBQ Pit Masters, Finding Bigfoot, Remodeling with Bigfoot, Buying Alaska, Skiing Tips with Bigfoot, and their other shows, but companies flat out don't want to advertise during TNA. WWE has run into some of that, but they raise USA's ratings enough that they can charge more for ad space on their other shows, and since going PG more companies are willing to advertise during WWE's shows. It's not DA's fault that advertisers don't want to buy ad space during Impact.
Advertisers look for a few factors when they put their ad time on a show, but Nielsen ratings are more than just a measure of how many people your show will reach, they're a rough idea of how much ad space should cost. The reason that Super Bowl half-time show commercials are insanly expensive to run one of isn't because the NFL wants a lot of money for the limited space, but because there are now over a hundred million people watching the half-time show, and the spot is thus incredibly valuable.
I don't know for certain what kind of commercials Destination America gets since I'm in Canada, but I imagine given its demographics that it's a lot like the commercials I see on American Heroes Channel, which is very skewed toward old people. Hearing aids, medication, insurance, collectible coins, and the like. By and large, commercials for a channel are not specific to a show; a company pays to have their commercials run on the shows, there may be a parity in the value of one show over another in the event of high-rated TV shows airing new episodes for the first time, but generally you'll see the same commercials spread throughout a channel's line-up based on which shows the people behind that commercial want to advertise on. They're paying the channel a certain amount of money to air X amount of dollars worth of the value of their commercials.
Those companies don't want to pay for ad space on a wrestling show. It's just not a product that they feel has an audience that either they want to reach, or to whom they feel their product is actually relevant for. USA Network has a smiliar issue, but Raw is big enough that it attracts its own sponsors and people who specifically want to target WWE's audience, because it draws millions of people every week. TNA is pulling under half a million on a d-list network, which means it sits far too much in obscurity and pitiful ratings to draw that kind of specialized attention.
On Spike, TNA was able to survive because wrestling's demographic has a lot in common with what Spike's was, and so finding companies who felt that wrestling fans were worth advertising to was not that difficult. DA doesn't have that luxury. It's a dollars game for advertisers, because they're looking to maximize each dollar they put into a network, and if they feel that it would be better to not use their air time on this show, then that is on them, and Destination America really can't do anything to make companies change their minds. It's a low-end network, but it's part of the massive network that is Discovery, and it's hardly an ignorance thing for advertising firms, but an effort thing. They don't think it's worth it.
To put your piano player analogy into better perspective, it's more like this: I'm a classical piano player, and I want to advertise my recital. I can either do this by targeting locations where people who listen to classical piano would be, or I can buy ads at local clubs and try to draw ravers, because hey, reach is reach.