From the 4/5/19 edition of Wrestling Observer Radio.
Bryan: "Ratings are in for the show and the most shocking thing, I guess, a 37% (THIRTY SEVEN) drop year-over-year for Smackdown. You told me that!
Dave: "I was comparing the RAW teenage demographic for the show last monday to the same show a year ago and that was a 37% drop. But another thing too with RAW is that last year's RAW went against the NCAA finals. This year's RAW didn't go up against anything. They went up against a female basketball game that drew 1,000,000 viewers, not 16,000,000 viewers like last year's game and it was down 22% overall but 37% among teens."
Bryan: "This is a prized demographic. It's not 18-34 but still."
Dave: "The number that was the steadiest was the 50+ demographic, and it was down less than 10%. But every demo was down with both men and women severely. It's amazing to me, the change in culture year over year, some of it's the loss of popularity, the NBA didn't drop this much, the NFL didn't drop this much. Smackdown was 2.1 million viewers... There were a couple of weeks where the ratings were okay but... 2.6 million viewers for RAW..."
Bryan: "The go-home show for Wrestlemania."
Dave: "They'll have a big number Monday, probably the biggest of the year. But after that, once we get into May and the NBA finals, we're going to be hitting some record lows for sure. They got paid a lot of money from people when they negotiated those deals a year ago when these numbers were a lot higher. The scariest part is that the drop is so young because that's your future. The 50+ demo is not your future. That drop is probably just people getting old and not watching or dying off. But the future demographic is the one dropping real bad. They might not have a future."
OH NO NO NO NO NO NO AHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA. WWE WON'T MAKE IT TO 2025.
Teens want degenerate counter culture. Face tats, drugs, violence and sex. Not this SJWorkrate shit we have now.
David Long
Have sex
Ethan Rivera
WHY DOES DAVE MELTZER HATES WWE SO MUCH WITH HIS LOW RATING FACTS?
Henry Harris
>T-typed o-out a w-wall of text.
I just paraphrased what was said in the podcast, faggots. If you don't want to read 30 seconds of text, feel free to listen to the first few minutes of this then.
This isn't news. The problem WWE seemed to have in the early 2010s was every time they'd have an opportunity to build stars that would appeal to younger audiences (Punk, Bryan, etc) they'd see a drop in the boomers and shit themselves and bring in nostalgia acts. There's going to be a transitional period, inevitably. Refusing to cultivate a new generation so you can appease a shrinking demographic is retarded.
Aiden Parker
Bob Iger is 68.
Matthew Thompson
What was the last movie Bob Iger wrote?
r is it that he is aware of his own strengths and weaknesses and knows that it's a leader's job to delegate duties unlike CEO's of dying wrestling companies?
Jace Martin
FOX is gonna end up renegotiating this tv deal if the numbers stay low compared with the programming they currently have on Fridays
Oliver Reed
I didn't know Vince wrote the shows. I thought they had writers.
Gavin Green
This is definitely true. Ask people in their 30's and up. Everyone at one point liked wrestling, but very few do now.
Dave unfortunately isn't going to look in the mirror and realize he's played a role in the lack of wrestling popularity. He's convinced a whole generation of fans that there is nothing to wrestling except flips and good matches.
Jose Fisher
Let Corbin get the full on head tat he wants and ratings go up. Guarantee it happens. He’s already got the two smoothest signatures, a decent theme song, he’s killer on the mic, need a new outfit and the head tat, and he’s good to go
Jason Jackson
>FOX is gonna end up renegotiating this tv deal if the numbers stay low compared with the programming they currently have on Fridays
Yep. Plebbit refuses to believe Fox will do this though. They seriously think there's millions of people out there who want to watch wrestling but somehow cannot. There's not going to be any significant change in numbers when they move to Fox.
Adrian Scott
>I j-just para-paraphrased it Still typed it out, geek. Stop wrestling so seriously that you type out a wall of text and listen to podcasts about it. Have sex.
Isaiah Rivera
Everything goes through Vince. They have writers but it is not unusual for Vince to get an idea and change the show hours or minutes before filming. There was that disastrous RAW a few weeks back he was making up as it went along.
Hunter Ward
They have a team of writers, Vince is head.
On Wednesday and Thursday they have meetings all day and night writing RAM and Smackdown. Every writer is in charge of one particular segment and then they go away and communicate what is needed with the wrestlers in their segment. The writers work all weekend on their segments and then they come back on Monday and Tuesday ready for rehearsals before the show.
Then Vince decides he doesn't like any of it and single handedly rewrites everything hours before the show airs.
Leo Peterson
>This is definitely true. Ask people in their 30's and up. Everyone at one point liked wrestling, but very few do now. Everyone did childish things when they were young. 30s year olds don't watch cartoons or play video games either.
Charles Cooper
>This isn't news. The problem WWE seemed to have in the early 2010s was every time they'd have an opportunity to build stars that would appeal to younger audiences (Punk, Bryan, etc) they'd see a drop in the boomers and shit themselves and bring in nostalgia acts. There's going to be a transitional period, inevitably. Refusing to cultivate a new generation so you can appease a shrinking demographic is retarded.
Transitional periods are definitely a thing. I remember reading about how Mutoh/Chono/Hash were getting booed during their first main event pushes and they went on to become some of the biggest stars ever.
Brody Baker
>They have a team of writers, Vince is head.
I can't imagine trying to have multiple people write wrestling. You wouldn't have multiple people write a book or to make a dish or something. Everyone does things their own way and has their own biases and likings. No one else can see the world and wrestling the way I do and I can't see the way they see wrestling or the world either.
Oliver Adams
The post Wrestlemania Raw is going against the NCAA finals. Which should do fine since there's no teams that draw left
Alexander Clark
Zion would have destroyed them so bad.
Easton Ross
Good
Jaxson Campbell
It's going to be fun when AEW fails and these kids go to WWE
Angel Brown
We might be seeing peak edrone here
Logan Jackson
This. I don't constantly jerk off to the Attitude Era--I think the wrestling in many ways suffered and there was a lot of hot garbage--but wrestling certainly has lost a lot of its edge.
Easton Sanchez
Old news but still hilarious. WWE is dying and old drones are in denial. But but TV ratings and live attendances don't matter! Retards.
Most television is written by a team. The fact is that writing can also be a collaborative process. And if you don't stop namefagging, I'm gonna drag you out into that ring and butt fuck you in front of all these Yea Forumsies.
Austin Williams
>He's convinced a whole generation of fans that there is nothing to wrestling except flips and good matches. i think you overestimate the amount of people that know who he is
Grayson Cruz
But television shows don't break up the segments to writers. They write it cohesively. WWE is written like a sketch comedy show and it comes across disjointed. That's one of the reasons why Attitude Era Raws were so good.
Daniel Russell
Where do you think all of the indy wrestlers got the ideas from what a "good match" is? It all stemmed from Dave. His influence is far more expansive than you'd think.
Aaron Miller
>Good matches bad No wonder you got banned from every major wrestling forum, rzombie.
Liam Parker
>renegotiating that's a funny way to spell "cancel"
Christian Thompson
maybe they developed some ideas about the thing they do for money while doing it over and over again?
Kayden Cooper
Lol I don't deny AEW could fail but there is no chance in hell its fans go to WWE when it does. They're just going back to their video games and craft beers and grindr.
Dave is bitter WWE keep exposing him as a fraud because he gets easily worked by storylines on a (by his own admission) children's TV show.
Easton Ramirez
>Meltzer reported that FOX is starting to experience buyer remorse for over paying for SDL FOX just announced a one hour WWE Show to air on FS1 and there are talks about adding another hour to SDL. Give him $11.99 a month so you'll know when the plan changes
Justin Gomez
Literally who?
Sebastian Wilson
Wrestling as a whole is dying, it just isn't as popular as the early 2000s anymore.
John Myers
E-drones will say it is due to the internet, and it largely is, but not for the reasons they want to believe. People would rather just look at clips or recaps of the shows online than watch the full shows, and WWE makes pennies from sites like YouTube.
Justin Foster
It's not really just 9/11, but rather what came before hand. Trends. Namely controlled trends. The 1990s was largely an era about controlled trends. X was the thing to have and if you didn't, you were a LOSER. We can look at the rise of comic speculation (with shit like 1st Edition EXCLUSIVE Super Holofoil variant covers that are worthless, since people though all comics would have the same payday as Action Comics #1 or Spiderman's first comic), which birthed Tickle Me Elmo, Beanie Babies and Pokemon as the major fads. There were more trends, obviously, but the latter 3 drew everyone into a froth.
Why were people driven into mania over this shit? Because of the media. Tickle Me Elmo was released in July 1996. You never heard shit about it, until after Thanksgiving. Almost half a year of nothing. Then the media reports that Tickle Me Elmo is the HOT NEW TOY OF THE YEAR, and how it's been selling out instantly. Was it? No, it really wasn't selling out that quickly at all. Completely bullshit but parents wanted the best for their kid, and the media told them that Tickle Me Elmo was the best toy. Parents would conflate spoiling kids as good parenting, because the tv told them to.
Nintendo would use pokemon to capitalize on this concept, that parents would HAVE to buy the best newest thing or else their kid would be made fun of. The MNW was part of this trend as well, if your kid didn't watch it, he was a fucking loser left in the dust. Why? Because WWF and WCW were mainstream, the media pushed it out as a trend. The MNW proved that the media doesn't have to push anything of real quality to people, the plebs will eat anything up.
