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Post by eJm on May 21, 2024 10:48:08 GMT -5
I was a Nielsen panelist for a couple years during the pandemic. I had to wear a stupid little meter on my waist all day, but those $15 monthly checks were cool. …what? Why?
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Post by eJm on May 21, 2024 10:42:39 GMT -5
This is the funniest part about all of this to me. I am not trying to trivialize statistics as a field or begrudge anyone who enjoys analyzing this stuff, but there are approximately 42,000 "Nielsen Households" in the United States out of approximately 125 million households total. So every 1 Nielsen Household represents 3,000 viewers. I read the press statement and I still can't believe this is possibly true. 42,000 households. That's slightly less than the population of Dundalk, County Louth here in Ireland. Not even 100,000 households...42,000. That's...how have we had so many arguments over so little percent of the US population?
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Post by eJm on May 21, 2024 9:32:38 GMT -5
Babyfaces get their ass beat way too frequently and easily in aew. No reason Swerve should have been laid out as many times as he has like a month into his reign. It’s not misery booking levels but it does give the vibe of a show booked by a dude who’s just doing stuff because that’s what you do on a wrestling show and he doesn’t understand how to actually book based off context and timing. I mean, can you link that to viewership in any way? I ask because that’s what the whole vibe of this thread is about and the general ratings discourse has been about. Because I could say 800k people stopped watching Raw for the past month because Cody has only cut promos and faced an AJ Styles that the kids call “washed” and nobody can care for and it’d be the same outcome of me not being able to prove it and ignore the rest of the media landscape or even separate our opinion of the show from it since, like…what does that have to do with the wider amount of people?
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Post by eJm on May 21, 2024 8:13:07 GMT -5
I think what also got to me is, like...for how straight voiced she is in her videos, Jenny's absolutely willing to dive into a park experience or even small experiences. She travelled miles to pick up a giant spider and stopped by a Western town and the deserted Flintstones park and got such a big kick out of it. She walked around Evermore trying to buy a t-shirt, even to the company CEO, and got told "Nah" (and now Evermore is dead. Coincidence? I mean, no it's more surprising it's closing in the year of our lord 2024 but anyway).
Like, she wants to enjoy stuff. She doesn't go somewhere to be snide and cynical, she wants to enjoy the experience so if you can't get someone willing to invest in your experience to actually be invested, that's just a failing on the experience. And it makes the rant at the end hit harder because Disney used to be the King of that sort of thing.
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Post by eJm on May 21, 2024 8:03:37 GMT -5
So answer me this, and be completely honest. When is Iyo going to get another meaningful run at the top, where she isn't constantly putting others over, and actually gets some major CLEAN wins over some actual major names? Because with how WWE is booking her, I'm pretty confident the answer is going to be "never". WWE isn't truly invested in her. They ACT like they do, but they aren't. I'm trying to be respectable here because it's no secret I don't care for the melodramatic overreactions to these things, but I can't say one way or the other. If Asuka is anything to go by, Sky probably still has a handful of title runs left to go without possibly ever getting the "designated protagonist" dominate all comers run that her fanbase wants. There's also the fact that there still hasn't been an actual babyface run on the main roster yet, which people seem really ready to get behind if that gets off the ground. She's basically in a Dolph Ziggler position at the moment, the heel workhorse that gets put out to have good matches for TV with people on the way up the card, but it took literally years after that only world title run for Dolph Ziggler to become everyone's idea of Dolph Ziggler, that being the guy who will never make it to the top properly and thus isn't worth caring about. Being such a strong worker is a blessing and a curse in this regard. Just have to see where things go. Honestly better than I was going to say, especially with my lack of experience in recent WWE. What I will say is that having not watched, I don't know if some of the reaction to this is actually felt by the fanbase in general or something that WWE feels a need to "fix" or something just around here that people feel without much evidence to it. And to answer the question myself? I don't know. She just came off a substantial reign for her standards, or most of the women not named Becky, Rhea or Charlotte, and she's still over so it's not like she's being released tomorrow or anything and I have no real context for what the actual product is for the most part so...*shrug*.
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Post by eJm on May 21, 2024 7:13:25 GMT -5
The thing with a lot of these people is that "a healthy women's division" doesn't mean a healthy women's DIVISION, it just means their favourite on top in perpetuity. If Iyo Sky was some unbeatable juggernaut that looked strong in every match and every promo, 90% of our discourse wouldn't exist. Like, you and I have spoken about this before, one of the issues with the callup pipeline (and something they actually seem to be resolving now) is that there was talent lingering in NXT who had done everything and not making room for talent needing to debut and be showcased which was the entire point of the previous format of the show. They're beginning to solve that and instead of having credible people just bouncing around the top of the card, you're finally giving life to Raw and Smackdown with fresh talent and feuds and for that to be beneficial, you need to tell people that these people are actually worth watching instead of how most NXT callups get treated. I mean, I don't know what'll happen when NXT gets to CW and they actually have to treat it like a separate brand but the logic now makes sense.
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Post by eJm on May 21, 2024 6:55:24 GMT -5
Very fair question. Here’s my response. They are all more over than Lyra is. I thought that you were supposed to be REWARDED for getting over. That’s how it’s supposed to work right? Not be beaten because of it. It goes back to that age old question. Should you win an accolade to try and get you over. Or should you already be over and THEN win an accolade as a result of that? Also Tiffany in particular has not won A match on TV since MARCH 8th. So that is another problem arguably. She's been on Raw less than a month and they're using a tournament to get her over. QotR isnt a reward or accolade, is just a plot point, a character builder. It's not a MitB or Royal Rumble where the winner is someone that destined to headline major. Good lord, the last (and only so far) Queen was Zelina Vega. Also...how else are you supposed to get someone over outside of gaining big wins to put them at a certain level? Like, again, putting my bias aside for just a second, Lyra is a former NXT Women's Champion who beat Becky Lynch clean as a sheet on an NXT show not that long ago to win that championship. I'm sure that's been brought up on the product itself but that's just me using the narrative established. You have to establish someone and make them seem like someone who can be credible and can hang with members of your roster rather than just have them beat some lower tier people and hope that'll do anything.
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Post by eJm on May 21, 2024 6:42:48 GMT -5
Honestly, and it might have been a power play or whatever, it says a bit more about HHH and even Nick Khan for letting it happen at all. Rock is a shareholder. He’s not management, he’s not got as much power outside of vetoing board decisions and as far as we can tell, “Rock vs. Roman or Cody vs. Roman” isn’t something you bring to a board of directors without people knowing.
Like, this is the dude who, after WrestleMania 39, ranted about how fans should trust the process and let bookers tell the story they want to and if it wasn’t for the fan backlash, the first Cody loss to Roman would have lead to Cody passing his Royal Rumble win to a dude who showed up one other time to tease such a thing and did nothing about it who hadn’t wrestled a full match for over a decade prior. They’re unbelievably lucky they got away with it to be quite blunt.
EDIT: They were also lucky that Rock was willing to play ball after that because what would have happened if he wasn’t? They would have basically had to do the match if he had the power to veto such a thing. We’d be talking about a wildly different WrestleMania if it didn’t happen.
How did nobody think any of this through, never mind Gewirtz?
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Post by eJm on May 21, 2024 3:44:20 GMT -5
Yeah, this sucks. Bad Bones seemed like a guy who caught enough attention to get places like Fight Factory to book him and other German workers and I never really heard a bad word about the guy from those who travelled in Europe.
40 is not an age to die at all. Rest in Peace.
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Post by eJm on May 21, 2024 2:42:28 GMT -5
Honestly I stopped caring about the plot of this series like halfway through 2 anyway, though really even then the only games I’ve actually played to completion are 1 and 2. Played them many times but never had any real taste for the rest. Not taking this at you in particular but I see a lot of people say this and it's sort of put me off if people are like "Oh, the story isn't important" and it's like...I'm playing an RPG. A very long one by all accounts, if there isn't some kind of plot investment needed or important to taking in the world you're playing in, I'll just play something else. It's that or be on my phone when the cutscenes happen and that doesn't feel like a great use of gaming time either.
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Post by eJm on May 20, 2024 14:28:04 GMT -5
Brandon Thurston does a lot of good work but this seems insane just to even publish as a story given how there's not even correlation in a lot of these data points, let alone connection. It’s like using Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes to judge someone’s career. It’s all an estimate; it doesn’t mean very much in terms of pure analysis.
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Post by eJm on May 20, 2024 13:00:06 GMT -5
I agree with you but I also feel like I've been hearing those words for literal decades. Especially when there weren't any streamers interested in showing sports until the past couple of years. Especially when that bubble is only getting bigger. The live deals for the NFL, NBA, and NHL are only getting larger. Astronomical even. Like, it’s probably going to burst at some point but when Netflix is willing to pay $75m per game for each of the three games for three years, never mind what Amazon might be paying for a tier of NBA games, it won’t be for the next 3 years at least.
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Post by eJm on May 20, 2024 12:51:15 GMT -5
I do see handwringing about business metrics elsewhere and it's exhausting in other fandoms, but wrestling fandom's specific brand of it is so tiring in a way that makes me not wanna talk about wrestling online at all much anymore lol. What makes it more annoying in wrestling is that for a great part of the late 90s, it wasn’t a thing you can escape from either WWF or WCW TV. Hogan and the nWo cut monologues about ratings and drawing power and how much money they made and the starting point of Austin/McMahon was “you’re a draw but you can be more of a draw if you’re more like how I want you to be”. And that’s before we get into the shots both sides took, the mentions of TV ratings and stuff on an almost weekly basis. You can’t talk about the Monday Night Wars without any of that stuff, ergo, people feel like you can’t take about pro wrestling without that stuff. What about ECW, you might ask? Well, Heyman put a lot of time into bitching about the network that was airing his company’s show! You couldn’t even escape it in the alternative.
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Post by eJm on May 20, 2024 11:17:23 GMT -5
The Bear and Shogun are two of the most critically acclaimed shows of the past year, both have been FX staples. Neither have ever cracked above 500k, never mind a million. Oh, and some long running sitcom called It's Sometimes Raining in Boston, something like that. It's why Raw going to Netflix is a great move for them. Their viewership on there even without Netflix's number-fudging is likely going to increase substantially. And it will do so with a younger audience compared to cable. It's why I think including Max in any AEW-WBD deal is going to be very important for long-term growth. Not just that, taking the UK/Ireland, Canadan and Latin American audience with them for Smackdown, NXT and Live Events. All of them have been under expensive subscription models for ages and with people more likely to have Netflix accounts, the audience potential is much higher. It just makes sense, with your sports streamer potentially losing the NBA, to try and get AEW nailed down for that service to get people subscribing to that.
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Post by eJm on May 20, 2024 11:05:00 GMT -5
Yeah, there's also this notion that AEW will only be viewed as "successful" if it consistently breaks a million weekly viewers again. But, like, nothing breaks a million weekly viewers anymore. Based on the data I've seen, other than cable news and HGTV, Curse of Oak Island is the only cable show besides RAW that is averaging over a million weekly viewers. Even things like Little People, Big World and Vanderpump aren't getting a million a week, if data is to be believed. The Bear and Shogun are two of the most critically acclaimed shows of the past year, both have been FX staples. Neither have ever cracked above 500k, never mind a million. Oh, and some long running sitcom called It's Sometimes Raining in Boston, something like that.
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Post by eJm on May 20, 2024 11:03:44 GMT -5
Yeah I think both WWE and AEW are benefitting from the live sports bubble right now....next time negotiations come around though, we'll see if that bubble finally has burst.... I agree with you but I also feel like I've been hearing those words for literal decades. Especially when there weren't any streamers interested in showing sports until the past couple of years.
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Post by eJm on May 20, 2024 10:55:28 GMT -5
I'll say again, I used to be one of those people who used to wonder when Raw was being axed because ratings were declining year by year in a rapid pace, slowing down only for John Cena's rise and then collapsing when the Authority basically made it so every babyface but Cena was a f***ing mook. I'll throw my hands up and admit that.
The reason I didn't was because I looked at USA at the time and thought "Wait...what would they replace it with?" Suits came and went and USA was basically a WWE and Law & Order re-run channel until Chucky came along but Raw, Smackdown and NXT were the things keeping the channel alive because the demos were good. If WWE decided to go elsewhere at that time, USA as a channel would be done. The reason USA doesn't need Raw as much now is because a) they'll have the NBA in 2025 so that'll fill the spot way better and get them more ad revenues and b) they launched an original narrative programming initiative that is basically taking advantage of the fact TNT and others are ditching original live action narrative shows for cheaper reality TV based ones and see the hole in the market. Also banking off the fact they once had Monk, Psyche, Burn Notice etc for this initiative. So they can get Smackdown on Fridays, NBA across the week and original programming to balance it all out and potentially become a network people want to watch again.
I say this because, well, the same is sort of happening here. We're seeing some aspects and not the wider picture. It's clear Turner is going to try and keep AEW not just because it does well but because it'll be a pillar with NHL and college football now that the NBA is slipping away. And if they don't, someone else will snatch it up because, well, they're popular in the demos. #1-#5 almost weekly for the past 2-3 years isn't something to sniff at, most networks would kill for that right now.
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Post by eJm on May 20, 2024 10:44:06 GMT -5
I wasn’t using financial metrics in that argument. I was just saying during that time, the online narrative was definitely more negative towards WWE.. I mean, you did earlier by talking about attendances and ratings. The online narrative was bad but, like, WWE was still basically the only major company until AEW fully launched in May (arguably after that since most of the build for DoN was on YouTube and it didn't really kick off until after the WBD Upfront announcement) so none of it was going to hurt them since they were making money regardless. Why would they care if Oli Davis or Jack the Jobber bashed them on YouTube?
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Post by eJm on May 20, 2024 10:37:21 GMT -5
I think it’s just because AEW are giving people reasons to pessimistic about the product. It’s the same thing that was going on with WWE from 2019 - 2022. Its was the easiest time to dunk on and be negative towards WWE. It’s just shifted. Unfortunately negative stories get clicks and right now, it’s AEW’s turn. I mean, people on here seem to like the product in general so to put it on that level feels weird. Especially after the end of 2023 being the real height of trying to get the WWE audience basically crashing and burning. Also, if we're also using financial metrics, WWE's most profitable year before the recent new boom was 2020 because they weren't paying arena costs and were still getting TV money because they happened to fit the quota of programming networks wanted for that time. And 2019, they signed the FOX deal which was a big deal for WWE to go back to network TV along with renewing with USA for a massive amount of money. So even using your own arguments, going to 2019 is weird because, yeah, creatively, it was one of Vince's worst years but most of that was being rewarded. Whilst on the other side of the coin, WBD loves AEW, keeps promoting AEW, just gave them a show on one of their YouTube channels and would top the demos regularly if sports wasn't a factor. So unless that changes, it's all just narratives. When they even have the opportunity to say to a site like Fightful or PWInsider that it's an issue anonymously, they've said they're not concerned. So, I don't know, I'd trust the people still airing the product on this. There's probably reasons we don't fully know because we don't have the data.
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Post by eJm on May 20, 2024 9:11:16 GMT -5
I certainly don't think that Legentil is sitting on the top floor of his supervillains lair personally posting anti-AEW stuff like: What I do think, though, is that WWE's PR team, be it Legentil or whoever else, has been incredibly successful in leveraging the drama that AEW dealt with late last year into making it trendy to disparage the company, which has, by and large, turned YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc... into a pro bono PR wing for the company. AEW has obviously only been around for 5 years, but the current IWC is wildly anti-AEW. On almost any other forum besides here and r/AEWOfficial (which cuts too hard the other way), having a take as milquetoast as "Dynamite was pretty solid this week" is met with a deluge of "how can you enjoy something so bad!?!?!?!! have you SEEN the empty seats?!?!?!?!?!" or "wow, you must be a real dork, basement-dwelling neckbeard" or "HOW DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHO ANY OF THESE PEOPLE ARE?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!" or, my personal favorite, "hah! I'll be over here watching WWE. It's cooking™." WWE's incredibly effective PR in casting AEW as a bush league promotion with no leadership is no small part of that. Which I mean, I don't like it but...it's not something I can't blame them for. Like, they've been trying to do it since AEW started with Vince's shareholder statement being famously turned into their version of War Games so yeah, if there's an opportunity to strike, it's when your opponent is weakened and is less focused on taking advantage of your mistakes. Like, HHH has given them enough ammunition alone but, well, how can you respond to his statements when you haven't exactly come out of press conferences squeaky clean?
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