Alvarez: TNA Fans "Bad track record of buying anything"

[kidglov3s]

Listening to Wrestling Observer Live and they're talking about TNA right now. I can't go back so I can only paraphrase/do my best to quote. Alvarez and Sempervive are saying that TNA's biggest problem has been that they can't convince TNA fans to spend money on their product. They talked about how many revenue streams WWE has compared to TNA, and that TNA has struggled to convince fans to pay for their product or create avenues for them to do so.

Some quotes from Alvarez:
"That's my great concern about writing The Death of TNA if it goes under, would any TNA fans actually buy it? Because they have a bad track record of buying anything. Maybe I would do it in the hopes of, I wouldn't lose any money doing it, but in a best case scenario the book might make more money than TNA ever made."
"I feel bad burying them to such a degree but you got over a million people watching the show but you couldn't get more than 8,000 of them buy the pay per view? How is that even possible?"
"WWE Has 3-4x the number of viewers for Raw as Impact has, but a bad WWE pay per view does 13 times the number of buyers as a TNA pay per view, how is that even possible?"

Link to show: media001.f4wonline.com/free/092913wol.mp3

Discussion starts @ 31:01.

[Michael Coello]

Big talk from Alvarez. He's still hasn't gotten that damn boat yet.

We're waiting, dickwad.

[Magic knows Black Lives Matter]

Sept 29, 2013 18:04:35 GMT -5 Michael Coello said:

Big talk from Alvarez. He's still hasn't gotten that damn boat yet.

We're waiting, dickwad.

TNA isn't getting 4 and 5's yet! They gotta live up to their side of the agreement.

[kidglov3s]

Sept 29, 2013 18:04:35 GMT -5 Michael Coello said:

Big talk from Alvarez. He's still hasn't gotten that damn boat yet.

We're waiting, dickwad.

GOLDEN BOAT!

[Magic knows Black Lives Matter]

In all seriousness though...he's not really wrong. I mean, wasn't the rumor going around that TNA PPVs averaged like 10,000-15,000 buys? For a television company with a weekly audience of a million plus, that's pathetic. If that's true (and, who knows, it may be complete bullshit), then TNA fans aren't willing to pay for the product.

[Shark]

In all honesty, just look at what TNA did with their PPVs as enough proof that this is true. Does anyone think that they'd have cut back on so many PPVs if they were selling great? No matter how much they try to spin things, the PPVs cut just showed that no one was buying the shows. The problem still is that TNA is still having the same problems in that the reason no one bought them was that TNA did such a bad job building them up. It seems like TNA just thinks that because their PPVs are so rare now that people will buy them more, that's not how it works. You have to give people a REASON to buy. Here we are just 3 weeks from their biggest show of the year in Bound For Glory and the build for it has been almost nothing.

[Deleted]

I would argue that most TNA fans are also WWE fans and a lot of people don't have the means to buy multiple PPV's per month and since TNA isn't really essential viewing at the moment if most are going to get a wrestling PPV they'll go with the more reliable/better built up WWE show than the crapshoot that is a TNA PPV.

[Michael Coello]

I think the issue is, PPVs alone, yeah they don't get money from people. And TNA knows this.

It's why they push so hard their merchandise at live events, back with Don West and his deals at the PPVs and house shows, not sure now with Mickey Jay or whoever's in charge now. But I remember going to house show that broke 1,000 or so, but the idea was to get as much of those people to spend some money on their merch as possible, with either the programs, the t-shirts, the brown bag pack, the toys or masks or whatever, getting them to spend at least 20 bucks more to get whatever.

[Talent Name]

Heck look at their merchandising issues. The company that makes their action figures can't even get them out on time, the dvd's are almost non existent, the PPVS are terrible buys.

[Shark]

People will buy PPV if you give them a reason to. I think TNA and Bischoff especially have convinced themselves that PPV is a "dying media" so they put forth no effort pushing them, but they fail to realize that attitude is WHY people don't buy PPV. Give them a reason and they'll buy. TNA had 4 MONTHS to build BFG and they haven't outside of a commercial. If fans don't buy BFG, that's TNA's fault, not the fans

[HMARK Center]

In a way, TNA picked a terrible time to become a "mainstream" wrestling company; it's the era where people flat-out don't want to pay for content unless you're making it worth their while in some fashion.

Now, why does WWE still pull in decent PPV numbers? I'd argue that a big part of that is habit at this point: established company that built itself on the PPV marketplace, millions of fans who'll buy their shows as a monthly "hey, let's get together, have some pizza, and watch a pay per view, like we usually do"...that's a cache TNA doesn't have, largely by dint of coming into being in the early 2000's.

Honestly, I think TNA would do well to reassess how they look for revenue, and shift to a much more online-heavy format. TV is great, but PPV is largely not the way to go for most of pro wrestling anymore. Start streaming things, offer a membership fee, something along the lines of what ROH has done but on a larger scale.

Trying to make your name in a non-mainstream industry using old school methods won't cut it anymore.

[Djm Doesn't Find You Funny]

This gives credence to the idea that TNA has "fans".

An actual fanbase that watches them enthusiastically and doesn't just because it's pro wrestling and they're of that fanbase that will watch wrestling on TV simply because, they cover it for a loving, or just like watching TNA for the sake of shitting on it.

The number of TNA fans is probably very, very, very, very small.

[Emmet Russell]

What do you mean TNA fans won't spend money on the product? LOOK AT IT! it's glorious!

... shirts not bad either.

[AdamAFL was sooooo wrong]

I've said this before but everyone keeps trying to look for reason's why TNA struggles so much. The answer is simple. They aren't WWE. I'm not saying TNA are better than WWE. WWE has had by far the superior product to TNA pretty much since Wrestlemania. But WWE IS wrestling to a lot of folks and even people who casually follow TNA a lot of them see it as just another wrestling show that they can watch. It's something they watch to supplement their WWE intake.

To those people if TNA died it'd be a shame because they couldn't watch as much wrestling but they wouldn't really care, not like they would if WWE died. They're not gonna buy the PPV's because they are saving their money for what they deem to be the important stuff - WWE.

So you're left with just the hardcore audience who buy every TNA PPV as a matter of course - a very small percentage of people. You can't even count on the majority of the smarky audience because they are known for using illegal means to watch shows as opposed to buying them AND it's been cool to hate on TNA as a smark for as long as I've been on wrestling forums.

This isn't a "TNA get screwed because they're awesome and all wrestling fans are stupid" post. This has nothing to do with which company is better. This is a "WWE is bigger than wrestling" post. WWE could book at their very worst, TNA could book at their very best and WWE would still trash them in the ratings and especially the PPV buys simply because they're WWE.

[dude]

Lol. If you read the transcript of Dixie's congressional testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives's Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in 2007 you will find that she compared the people who buy tna toys to the fourty year old virgin movie. I found a quote. "Have you seen the 40-Year-Old Virgin with that man that has all the toys? I mean, that is kind of -- that's our audience".

[jason1980s]

I think it comes down to TNA has not given anyone, fans or non-fans, a reason to invest themselves personally or financially in their product.

Think about it. We are in the day and age where one can post a stupid video on youtube and it is on the MSN homepage or Fox News in addition to other places. I know because I have an MSN homepage (think it came with the internet) and my father watches Fox News non-stop though I don't do TV much. So we live in a day and age like that yet more people probably watched the grandma and grandpa who were filming themselves accidently on video than probably have watched TNA in 10 years.

It all comes down to TNA has not given anyone reason to care.

[Deleted]

Sept 29, 2013 19:28:20 GMT -5 AdamAFL was sooooo wrong said:

I've said this before but everyone keeps trying to look for reason's why TNA struggles so much. The answer is simple. They aren't WWE. I'm not saying TNA are better than WWE. WWE has had by far the superior product to TNA pretty much since Wrestlemania. But WWE IS wrestling to a lot of folks and even people who casually follow TNA a lot of them see it as just another wrestling show that they can watch. It's something they watch to supplement their WWE intake.

To those people if TNA died it'd be a shame because they couldn't watch as much wrestling but they wouldn't really care, not like they would if WWE died. They're not gonna buy the PPV's because they are saving their money for what they deem to be the important stuff - WWE.

So you're left with just the hardcore audience who buy every TNA PPV as a matter of course - a very small percentage of people. You can't even count on the majority of the smarky audience because they are known for using illegal means to watch shows as opposed to buying them AND it's been cool to hate on TNA as a smark for as long as I've been on wrestling forums.

This isn't a "TNA get screwed because they're awesome and all wrestling fans are stupid" post. This has nothing to do with which company is better. This is a "WWE is bigger than wrestling" post. WWE could book at their very worst, TNA could book at their very best and WWE would still trash them in the ratings and especially the PPV buys simply because they're WWE.

tna can't have that "woe is me" attitude that some it's fans have though. they're not wwe...okay. that doesn't mean they can't do better. tna needs to be the best it can be, wwe shouldn't even enter the equation.

i don't get the "it's cool to hate on tna" stuff, it's such an excuse. if anything it should be cooler to hate on wwe, since they're the big dog, the big corporation, the machine. that was the case 4 years ago, before bischoff and hogan came in and pissed on everything becuase it wasn't "mainstream" and said they were going to take this rinky-dink company to the top. the thing is, wwe is giving the hardcore/smark fans more of what they want than the 'alternative' right now, that's the problem.

[Michael Coello]

Sept 29, 2013 19:33:28 GMT -5 dude said:

Lol. If you read the transcript of Dixie's congressional testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives's Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in 2007 you will find that she compared the people who buy tna toys to the fourty year old virgin movie. I found a quote. "Have you seen the 40-Year-Old Virgin with that man that has all the toys? I mean, that is kind of -- that's our audience".

I've been in the Todd thread in Off-Topic.

That IS the audience.

[Rave]

I've preached this more than once. To get people to support something enough to open their wallets, they need to have a reason to care and to get emotionally invested in it. TNA's booking has been too chaotic to even begin to provide a single reason, because there's no guarantee that they won't drop something randomly or piss it away somehow, with that "somehow" usually being to sacrifice that reason to their latest shiny new import flavor of the month. IMO, TNA needs to break the mold that people like Hogan and Bischoff have forced it into and actually work to become that "alternative" again.

That and it's pretty much been established that the PPVs still exist to promote the TV product (and, apparently, other TV products), and it really should be the other way around.

[AdamAFL was sooooo wrong]

Sept 29, 2013 19:38:28 GMT -5 @lovehater said:

Sept 29, 2013 19:28:20 GMT -5 AdamAFL was sooooo wrong said:

I've said this before but everyone keeps trying to look for reason's why TNA struggles so much. The answer is simple. They aren't WWE. I'm not saying TNA are better than WWE. WWE has had by far the superior product to TNA pretty much since Wrestlemania. But WWE IS wrestling to a lot of folks and even people who casually follow TNA a lot of them see it as just another wrestling show that they can watch. It's something they watch to supplement their WWE intake.

To those people if TNA died it'd be a shame because they couldn't watch as much wrestling but they wouldn't really care, not like they would if WWE died. They're not gonna buy the PPV's because they are saving their money for what they deem to be the important stuff - WWE.

So you're left with just the hardcore audience who buy every TNA PPV as a matter of course - a very small percentage of people. You can't even count on the majority of the smarky audience because they are known for using illegal means to watch shows as opposed to buying them AND it's been cool to hate on TNA as a smark for as long as I've been on wrestling forums.

This isn't a "TNA get screwed because they're awesome and all wrestling fans are stupid" post. This has nothing to do with which company is better. This is a "WWE is bigger than wrestling" post. WWE could book at their very worst, TNA could book at their very best and WWE would still trash them in the ratings and especially the PPV buys simply because they're WWE.

tna can't have that "woe is me" attitude that some it's fans have though. they're not wwe...okay. that doesn't mean they can't do better. tna needs to be the best it can be, wwe shouldn't even enter the equation.

i don't get the "it's cool to hate on tna" stuff, it's such an excuse. if anything it should be cooler to hate on wwe, since they're the big dog, the big corporation, the machine. that was the case 4 years ago, before bischoff and hogan came in and pissed on everything becuase it wasn't "mainstream" and said they were going to take this rinky-dink company to the top. the thing is, wwe is giving the hardcore/smark fans more of what they want than the 'alternative' right now, that's the problem.

You totally missed my point. I'm not saying TNA can't do better, they sure as hell can. I'm just saying even if they did it wouldn't make them legit contenders with WWE or anything. It'd just mean they might do slightly better than they do now. They'd still be nothing more than a blip on WWE's radar.