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Post by Error on Jan 25, 2019 1:44:13 GMT -5
Good thing you +1ed this thread to help it grow. Yay? Point being. When ratings seems to go higher. Ratings thread are usually a ghost town. 10 or so replies. But If the next week the ratings dip back down. 4+ pages of Doom and gloom for WWE. Than the next week the cycle continues Case in point here's last weeks thread. officialfan.proboards.com/thread/582436/raw-viewershipI don't know just seems like if anything positive about the company arises it's swept under the rug while anything negitive about the WWE seems to get the most response and makes this place a bummer to hang around sometimes I don't think it is anything sinister, just when things are good, there isn't much to talk about or dig into compare to when things are going bad. |
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Post by Mister Pigwell on Jan 25, 2019 1:45:29 GMT -5
Good thing you +1ed this thread to help it grow. Yay? Point being. When ratings seems to go higher. Ratings thread are usually a ghost town. 10 or so replies. But If the next week the ratings dip back down. 4+ pages of Doom and gloom for WWE. Than the next week the cycle continues Case in point here's last weeks thread. officialfan.proboards.com/thread/582436/raw-viewershipI don't know just seems like if anything positive about the company arises it's swept under the rug while anything negitive about the WWE seems to get the most response and makes this place a bummer to hang around sometimes So post about things you like. Bring positivity around. There's tons if you don't selectively ignore it. Gonna let you guys on a bit of a tip, fighting what you see as negativity here due to others not liking a product, with negativity about the very people you want to see positivity from, is only going to lead to direct fighting and more negativity of an even worse kind. Fight negative vibes with positive ones. Quite simple. |
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Post by Mister Pigwell on Jan 25, 2019 1:57:52 GMT -5
Yay? Point being. When ratings seems to go higher. Ratings thread are usually a ghost town. 10 or so replies. But If the next week the ratings dip back down. 4+ pages of Doom and gloom for WWE. Than the next week the cycle continues Case in point here's last weeks thread. officialfan.proboards.com/thread/582436/raw-viewershipI don't know just seems like if anything positive about the company arises it's swept under the rug while anything negitive about the WWE seems to get the most response and makes this place a bummer to hang around sometimes That’s where I’m at. Now, obviously the criticism of WWE is warranted and people have their opinions, but most of the time it’s legitimately such a bummer to come on and see negativity 24/7. There are a few positive and joke threads here and there which I enjoy, but it’s mostly negative for the most part. At least to me. People are gonna see it differently and they have every right to. No ones wrong or right, but the negativity is such a drag for the most part. Really you want things to improve, just talk about what ya like. Others will join in. There's no room for positivity if you're not actually speaking up about your positive experiences. Make room for it. Post. What's going on in this thread (not saying this is you, just generally speaking) with shitting on posters and the board in general sure isn't adding to any positive vibe. So like, go make a thread on Rusev's bitchin hairline or something. |
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Post by Stone Cold Eleanor Shellstrop on Jan 26, 2019 17:25:25 GMT -5
PWInsider has everything going back to RAW 1000 and the start of the 3 hour RAW with each week's viewership. Here is 2018 and the first 3 weeks of 2019: It's a wall of numbers, no table (maybe I try tomorrow to do that for future use) I've also taken those PWInsider numbers going back to Raw 1000 in 2012 (except for Raw 1000 itself, because it was such an outlier) and made it into chart form, in case anyone wants to eyeball the general trend. Here is that chart (the link is to imgur; I don't want to post it here and clutter up the thread) Thanks for making this. It'd be nice to see a similar chart for SmackDown, to get a sense of how that show has done, despite several changes to its schedule over the years. The general trend is downward. Not a steep decline, but a consistent dwindling, with some odd peaks, like the one spike in early 2015 (around Wrestlemania time?). This chart also generally indicates something we already knew: that WWE's ratings do better in the first few months of the year (Royal Rumble to Wrestlemania) and poorly during the last few months of the year (post-Summerslam to pre-Royal Rumble). I suppose it's startling that this past Raw lost 25% of its audience, about 700,000 people, over the course of three hours, which is more or less the amount of viewers who stopped watching Raw altogether when one looks at the 1/15 and 1/29 Raw numbers from January 2018 (with Raw 25 as an anomaly). Maybe this amount of lost viewers is extreme, given the time of year when WWE is booking two of its most important shows, the Royal Rumble and Wrestlemania. I suspect that WWE only loses about 200,000 to 400,000 viewers per year on average, which is a conservative estimate, but still not good? Anyway, I get the point that some people find the negativity of these ratings threads to be tiresome, especially if ratings thread in which there is an improvement do not garner as much comment. However, at this point in the history of American professional wrestling, even if WWE were capable, consistent, and competent enough to chase positive ratings trends, I still don't know if the ratings would stabilize and grow as a result. My guess, short of WWE suddenly tapping into a new audience base like China or once again becoming massively popular with children, is that they probably wouldn't. |
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Post by chrom on Jan 26, 2019 18:57:42 GMT -5
I'm sure Steph will come out wearing a new hat and that'll fix everything
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Post by HMARK Center on Jan 26, 2019 22:44:59 GMT -5
I mean, there's a reason the "ratings have gone up" threads don't draw as many comments, and it's that the trend in WWE ratings has been downward for something like 15 years now. There are bumps up, sure, and there are one-off weeks and special events that draw better, but it's hard to make a conversation around "ratings were up .25 points this week" when it hasn't shown itself to be sustainable. If increases were sustained then people could start pointing to the things that they might believe are buoying the numbers, thus leading to more interesting conversations, but when the ratings pretty quickly go back to the slow (and increasingly quicker) slide downward it's tough to get a lot of interesting talking points out of a one-off week that does slightly better than the general trend.
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Post by Stone Cold Eleanor Shellstrop on Jan 27, 2019 13:57:40 GMT -5
I mean, there's a reason the "ratings have gone up" threads don't draw as many comments, and it's that the trend in WWE ratings has been downward for something like 15 years now. There are bumps up, sure, and there are one-off weeks and special events that draw better, but it's hard to make a conversation around "ratings were up .25 points this week" when it hasn't shown itself to be sustainable. If increases were sustained then people could start pointing to the things that they might believe are buoying the numbers, thus leading to more interesting conversations, but when the ratings pretty quickly go back to the slow (and increasingly quicker) slide downward it's tough to get a lot of interesting talking points out of a one-off week that does slightly better than the general trend. What's interesting, or frustrating, is that WWE has three data sets from which to draw conclusions, that most other TV shows don't, in order to improve the on-screen content: 1) The live audience; 2) Raw-to-SmackDown ratings increases/decreases; 3) Week-to-week Raw and SmackDown ratings increases/decreases. Within the last two, WWE also has the quarterly hour breakdown to see what works and what doesn't. I guess I keep coming back to the idea that we wrestling fans can't or shouldn't conflate quality of any WWE show (good, entertaining, logical, consistent, etc.) with the quality of the ratings. Specifically, WWE could do everything that wrestling fans want to see improve, but that there probably wouldn't be an appreciable increase in ratings. Certainly not for those whom exist outside the wrestling bubble. If you're an adult in North America in 2019 and you've never watched WWE, chances are you'll never seek WWE out (let alone ROH, LU, NJPW, TNA, All In, and so on). So WWE is left with its baseline 2 million audience from whom the company tries to wring out every last dollar. As a long-time wrestling fan, I stopped watching Raw in 2015, back when WWE had at least a million more people watching the show than those who watch Raw now. Even the old-timer wrestling fans are no longer a guaranteed market anymore. If anything, a lot of us either give up and/or age out of the product without replenishing the fan base, i.e. have kids we expose to professional wrestling entertainment. Ultimately, this speaks to your point, HMARK, that ratings and audience numbers have been trending downward for almost a generation. I don't know if another 'boom' era is even possible, with what Kevin Hamilton describes as the further fragmentation of TV audiences and streaming media. WWE is niche popular culture, non-WWE professional wrestling is a niche of a niche. WWE is in a precarious spot because the rates of the new TV deals, like when SmackDown goes to Fox, are not sustainable, if we are basing our evaluations on current ratings trends. WWE won't always have USA over a barrel if the costs of doing business aren't worth whatever ratings bump 3 hours of WWE pulls in. And Saudi money will also only carry the company so far (keeping in mind the possibility of any new international incident). I'm sure someone in WWE has a 5-year or 10-year long-term picture of business. But given what wrestling fans see week in and week out, I don't know if that person has the same picture in mind as those 200,000-400,000 fans who drop off year after year. |
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