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Post by This Player Hating Mothman on Sept 7, 2021 20:42:41 GMT -5
Nah there's definitely a problem. Ratings falls outpace television on average. Merch sales tumble year on year. Live attendance fell quarterly pre-pandemic. The majority of their money right now, more than ever before, is coming from other businesses as they sell themselves more and more to the industry than to a dwindling aaudience. These are objective facts their own financials bear out. This isn't internet fans going "my fave isn't pushed so the show is bad and they need to listen to me". But isn't that their business model now? Basically B2B, the money coming in from other businesses. They're basically just a content creation machine. That's their business model by necessity because their audience has retreated year on year? Also that's not a good thing. Being a content creation machine leveraging only your most rigidly committed die-hards isn't a sustainable model.
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Post by Edge of Insanity on Sept 7, 2021 20:49:40 GMT -5
Id take the comments more seriously if it wasn't creepy Santa making them. Cant take anything he says seriously, because if WWE called, he would be on raw next week talking about how great things are.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Sept 7, 2021 20:51:13 GMT -5
But isn't that their business model now? Basically B2B, the money coming in from other businesses. They're basically just a content creation machine. That's their business model by necessity because their audience has retreated year on year? Also that's not a good thing. Being a content creation machine leveraging only your most rigidly committed die-hards isn't a sustainable model. Do you know that for a fact, or are you merely speculating?
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Post by This Player Hating Mothman on Sept 7, 2021 21:21:51 GMT -5
That's their business model by necessity because their audience has retreated year on year? Also that's not a good thing. Being a content creation machine leveraging only your most rigidly committed die-hards isn't a sustainable model. Do you know that for a fact, or are you merely speculating? The entire point of using your audience as a leverage tool to get deals with other brands is that those brands benefit from the exposure to your audience. Networks get your viewers, advertisers get eyes on their commercials, licensers gets to sell their products with your logo on them to your fans. If you fail to hold onto your audience, the value of all of those goes goes down with it. The video games, for instance, rely on people liking WWE for the video games to move. If fewer people want to spend money on a WWE game, the value of the rights to make a WWE video game are worth less, so WWE receives less. I dug up a chart on the faintest googling showing WWE 2k19 sales figures compared to past games and save for 2k14, the games have progressively sold less in their first weeks, year on year. That's not to say losing the audience is the sole reason and the games are kinda f***ing disasters, but if this story plays out across enough platforms, yeah, that has a potential to hurt WWE. It's not speculation to say that a brand in a state of audience contraction is going to run into troubles when their business model turns to monetizing the fact they have an audience rather than their audience itself.
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Post by Magic knows Black Lives Matter on Sept 7, 2021 21:25:48 GMT -5
Yeah, he ain’t lying. Literally, all of it, on the nose.
WWE has done a rotten job advertising themselves to talent. For the first time in ages, there’s an honest to god market for talent and WWE is getting dog walked in pretty much every aspect with their presentation.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 7, 2021 21:41:29 GMT -5
Yeah, he ain’t lying. Literally, all of it, on the nose. WWE has done a rotten job advertising themselves to talent. For the first time in ages, there’s an honest to god market for talent and WWE is getting dog walked in pretty much every aspect with their presentation. When the WWE machine is pointed in the right direction, we got Austin, the Rock, John Cena, etc. Unfortunately, and this is just my opinion, there's a whole lot of "Yeah, they pay great, but other than it's pretty stagnant" feelings that you get out of talent. AEW can't take everybody, but it really does seem like the WWE is currently giving them an EZ Pass to the top crop of current and future talent.
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Post by Mighty Attack Tribble on Sept 7, 2021 22:05:25 GMT -5
Id take the comments more seriously if it wasn't creepy Santa making them. Cant take anything he says seriously, because if WWE called, he would be on raw next week talking about how great things are. Being willing to take a paycheque when it's offered doesn't negate what he says though. He has bills to pay just like anybody else (and the likely possibility of huge medical bills in his future), and his credibility in the eyes of wrestling board smarks sure ain't paying them.
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Mozenrath
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Post by Mozenrath on Sept 7, 2021 22:11:13 GMT -5
Id take the comments more seriously if it wasn't creepy Santa making them. Cant take anything he says seriously, because if WWE called, he would be on raw next week talking about how great things are. Being willing to take a paycheque when it's offered doesn't negate what he says though. He has bills to pay just like anybody else (and the likely possibility of huge medical bills in his future), and his credibility in the eyes of wrestling board smarks sure ain't paying them. It's also consistent. This isn't a dude who just sings everything's praises when he works for a place, considering he openly poked fun at TNA's shitty house show gates when he worked for them, is pretty openly critical of problems as he saw them in WWF/WWE when he was there in his books despite having positive points, too, etc.
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Post by Mighty Attack Tribble on Sept 7, 2021 22:17:32 GMT -5
Being willing to take a paycheque when it's offered doesn't negate what he says though. He has bills to pay just like anybody else (and the likely possibility of huge medical bills in his future), and his credibility in the eyes of wrestling board smarks sure ain't paying them. It's also consistent. This isn't a dude who just sings everything's praises when he works for a place, considering he openly poked fun at TNA's shitty house show gates when he worked for them, is pretty openly critical of problems as he saw them in WWF/WWE when he was there in his books despite having positive points, too, etc. Yeah. You can't compare him to somebody like those guys who rant and rave about what a scumbag Vince is and what a vile company WWE are only to go running back at the first sniff of a few bucks. This is a guy who's offered up his analysis of the issues facing the company, an analysis that I'm certain that probably everybody currently on the WWE's payroll outside Vince's inner circle at least partially privately agrees with.
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gl83
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Post by gl83 on Sept 7, 2021 22:21:26 GMT -5
On the real, I feel a lot of what Mick's saying but the reality is a lot of younger talent aren't going to think "damn, WWE or AEW" when their lights are about to go off. They'll go with the money exactly like all that other talent who signed with the company less than a month ago. Yeah, it's different for more experienced indie talent who are known a little bit but the younger younger talent nah, that doesn't apply to them. They'll just see "WWE wants me, imma go" and that'll be it. However, with the firing spree that WWE has been on this year, which has included people who had only just gotten there, I wonder if that might give these wrestlers some pause. Like several of these wrestlers weren't even signed for a year and they ended up getting released. In regards to stable income, AEW actually looks more appealing than WWE.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 7, 2021 22:42:20 GMT -5
On the real, I feel a lot of what Mick's saying but the reality is a lot of younger talent aren't going to think "damn, WWE or AEW" when their lights are about to go off. They'll go with the money exactly like all that other talent who signed with the company less than a month ago. Yeah, it's different for more experienced indie talent who are known a little bit but the younger younger talent nah, that doesn't apply to them. They'll just see "WWE wants me, imma go" and that'll be it. However, with the firing spree that WWE has been on this year, which has included people who had only just gotten there, I wonder if that might give these wrestlers some pause. Like several of these wrestlers weren't even signed for a year and they ended up getting released. In regards to stable income, AEW actually looks more appealing than WWE. It depends for who. If it's a newer talent who's just trying to make a name for themselves most of them aren't going to look at what WWE's done recently and go "man maybe AEW needs me more than WWE, screw WWE" and that's especially given that a lot of them are sleeping in their cars. A lot of people always think that they're going to be the outlier and always think that they can change how things are. At the end of the day, money calls. If you're talking about more established talent, the ones who are doing well on the indies then those are the ones who are going to think about the decision more.
It's like that thread a few weeks ago where WWE had that Las Vegas tryout with a lot of people and they ended up signing like 12 that day. Those people didn't say "man f*** WWE, AEW is better", they just did what they wanted to do because they saw something.
So yeah, some might pause but most people are probably gonna keep doing what they're doing based on what they know about the companies. What happened over the past week isn't going to be some global change to most of them.
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Post by sportatorium on Sept 7, 2021 23:31:49 GMT -5
He's spot on, but there's a bigger problem. WWE are like McDonald's. They don't care if people like the food, tons of people just eat it. They obviously don't care about weekly TV, as they just try to capture casual fans with their big annual events like Mania or Summerslam or spectacles like HIAC, MITB, The Rumble or Elimination chamber. They could keep shuffling the deck with Lashley/MVP, New Day, RKBRos & Styles/Omos every Monday and not care at all.
Vince has reached the end of caring about any sensibility or orthodoxy rooted in wrestling. A middling stooge like Nick Khan is pulling the strings over there and their measurement now is making NBC/Universal and Fox fight over their content.
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Mecca
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Post by Mecca on Sept 7, 2021 23:37:47 GMT -5
However, with the firing spree that WWE has been on this year, which has included people who had only just gotten there, I wonder if that might give these wrestlers some pause. Like several of these wrestlers weren't even signed for a year and they ended up getting released. In regards to stable income, AEW actually looks more appealing than WWE. It depends for who. If it's a newer talent who's just trying to make a name for themselves most of them aren't going to look at what WWE's done recently and go "man maybe AEW needs me more than WWE, screw WWE" and that's especially given that a lot of them are sleeping in their cars. A lot of people always think that they're going to be the outlier and always think that they can change how things are. At the end of the day, money calls. If you're talking about more established talent, the ones who are doing well on the indies then those are the ones who are going to think about the decision more.
It's like that thread a few weeks ago where WWE had that Las Vegas tryout with a lot of people and they ended up signing like 12 that day. Those people didn't say "man f*** WWE, AEW is better", they just did what they wanted to do because they saw something. So yeah, some might pause but most people are probably gonna keep doing what they're doing based on what they know about the companies. What happened over the past week isn't going to be some global change to most of them.
When they're looking to sign athletes with certain looks to train, yea those people aren't going to decline the offer.
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Post by kingoftheindies on Sept 8, 2021 10:28:01 GMT -5
With the disconnect between main roster and NXT. I've said this before but I don't think NXT was ever able to replace what Dusty meant to the developmental system to get people ready for the main roster. While there has been varying levels of success for prospects before that it feels like the transition for call ups has been worse since he passed away.
But I also think the Vince vs Triple H side of it has been talked to death.
As for creative? I think they have shown if they really want to WWE has shown that they can still tell a very compelling story. The issue of course is they get trapped into capturing moments which hurts story lines and they also tend to get bored with acts aside from a select few.
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Post by "Evil Brood" Jackson Vanik on Sept 8, 2021 10:49:22 GMT -5
I mean…nobody has said that? So I don’t know where you get that from. And I also don’t know what that has to do with addressing the problems they’ve had for decades now. They’ll still make the same amount if they solve them. Maybe they don't think there is a problem. Maybe it isn't a problem. I dunno. They definitely think or have at least thought there were problems in the very recent past. They brought back Heyman and Eric to try to jolt perception of the product. They fired them as scapegoats when that didn't work. They told us we were the Authority. They've brought back older stars to pop ratings all the time with randomly announced Legends Nights. They're completely retooling their developmental brand. They're trying to fix things or at least improve their metrics for the sake of their business. Yes they're making record profits but Vince got this far by wanting to maximize every profit possible. Now the issue is a lot of these attempted fixes don't get at the root of the problem which is Vince and his erratic writing/booking. But they're trying.
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Post by polarbearpete on Sept 8, 2021 11:12:26 GMT -5
But isn't that their business model now? Basically B2B, the money coming in from other businesses. They're basically just a content creation machine. That's their business model by necessity because their audience has retreated year on year? Also that's not a good thing. Being a content creation machine leveraging only your most rigidly committed die-hards isn't a sustainable model. As long as they’re number 1 in the demo or close to it year after year, they will be in a good position when it comes time to renegotiate their TV deals, which is their main source of income. I don’t see the Network/Peacock becoming less of a value either. Their Network numbers were fairly stable over time. I’m sure they’d love to have a larger audience but I don’t think things are trending towards disaster financially either.
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knightboat
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Post by knightboat on Sept 9, 2021 2:13:50 GMT -5
People on the internet always talk about the WWE like it's objectively bad, and are on the verge of dying unless they listen to the internet fans. But they are making money. They are thriving. It doesn't appeal to us, but they're not trying to. It's not their goal. I mean…nobody has said that? So I don’t know where you get that from. And I also don’t know what that has to do with addressing the problems they’ve had for decades now. They’ll still make the same amount if they solve them. This is a really good point. It doesn't cost more money to put together good shows. It doesn't affect profits if they write good stories. If anything they'd make more money.
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Post by This Player Hating Mothman on Sept 9, 2021 2:25:22 GMT -5
I mean…nobody has said that? So I don’t know where you get that from. And I also don’t know what that has to do with addressing the problems they’ve had for decades now. They’ll still make the same amount if they solve them. This is a really good point. It doesn't cost more money to put together good shows. It doesn't affect profits if they write good stories. If anything they'd make more money. In an ideal world, WWE could make big f***off money on TV deals, something they're clearly managing with an underdelivring product, but also put on better shows that aren't the same shit as last week and aren't total misery to drag through, and benefit from having more audience in the building, more people buying merch, more people tuning in. It's weird to deflect to "Well their model is one where they don't have to worry about fans" because the fans are still there and the products are still being offered, even if they're no logner where WWE makes the bulk of its money. It'd be healthier for the company, but even healthier still for the wrestlers who would move more merch if they weren't tanked by the writing and could actually become the stars they aren't allowed to be. Which actually leads into a nice other facet to this; WWE is bringing in these massive windfall profits, but those profits aren't seeming like they're really going to the wrestlers if they're trimming out any contracts that are 'too expensive' and citing budget cuts up and down the card. There's a position to be taken that WWE's only obligation is to its shareholders, but that's a load of crap on any actual moral level. If wrestlers weren't kept in limbo, they'd be better off financially too.
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Post by Mid-Carder on Sept 9, 2021 2:34:28 GMT -5
I understand why Vince doesn't care but it just seems so strange to me that a man who has literally devoted his entire life to building his wrestling company (and the industry as a whole) could be so unconcerned about how it will be left after he's gone.
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Post by Limity (BLM) on Sept 9, 2021 3:25:39 GMT -5
I understand why Vince doesn't care but it just seems so strange to me that a man who has literally devoted his entire life to building his wrestling company (and the industry as a whole) could be so unconcerned about how it will be left after he's gone. I would pay money to learn about what, where, and when Vince finally decided enough was enough.
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