6. “Ratings Aren’t The Most Important Thing In Wrestling” – Evan Bourne
During a recent appearance on Sports Illustrated’s Pancakes and Powerslams Show, former WWE Superstar Evan Bourne talked about the decline in WWE TV ratings. Below is what he said:
“I understand that ratings are important. You have to realize WWE’s contract. They’re not getting paid from advertising money. USA makes that money. WWE gets paid by USA, they get paid a lot of money, and the money increases every year. Ratings aren’t the most important thing to them.
And, let’s just be honest: ratings aren’t as precise as internet clicks and time spent on the website. If you look at that, WWE is crushing everyone. So I think ratings might not be the best metric with which to rate wrestling in this day and age. But it does mean they’ve got big distribution.
Let’s face it: when we were crazy into wrestling, there were 20 million people on Monday nights watching wrestling. So what you have are 17 million lagged wrestling fans. People who connect to it somewhere, but haven’t really found an inspiration or a cultural connection to it.
That’s been missing because wrestling’s been dominated by one person. It’s like if every song on the radio had to go through the same producer. You would say that this is always the same thing because it’s always produced by the same place.”
