Are WWE's ratings really that bad or?

WWE's ratings certainly aren't abysmal, but they are a number of issues that they create themselves that don't do them any favors. In fact, more often than not they shoot themselves in the foot with some of the decisions they make.

Everyone comments on how the WWE's pay-per-view buy rates are through the floor, and they are. There is one very simple reason for that, and it has nothing to do with the internet. The core reason for declining interest in WWE pay-per-views over the last few years has to do with the basic fact that there are just way, WAY to many of them, and they all cost way, WAY to much.

I mean, more than any other time in human history, we live in a fast-paced world where the entertainment market is flooded with options, and they're all competing for the average man and woman's entertainment dollar. In a prolonged recession where the regular Joe is struggling more than ever to keep his job, funds are tight, and the WWE hasn't even attempted to adjust their marketing strategies to reflect that. They still continue to pump out pay-per-views every three weeks at astronomical prices. When you match that up and consider that UFC does the exact same thing (and that UFC is much more popular among mainstream fans than the WWE), the math just doesn't work. In Canada, it costs upwards of $60, when you account for taxes and fees, to order a WWE PPV at home. That's just too much.

That problem is only compounded when you look at your average RAW or Smackdown every week. For the most part, the weekly programming on those shows is excellent. They provide high quality matches, drama and some great wrestling. They continue the feuds and the big names take each other on regularly. All of that comes on FREE television. Sure, the avid WWE fans are still going to buy every pay-per-view, but to the strictly casual fan, the one not surfing the internet to discuss wrestling (which is the demographic the WWE heavily caters to), they can get their wrestling fix on Monday's and Fridays. Why would the average guy, who has free NFL, NHL, NBA, MLB and a million other entertainment options at his fingertips, plunk down his credit card and shell out that kind of money for wrestling that, in all honesty, isn't that much better than the typical RAW or Smackdown? He or she gets those for free every week.

The problem is that the WWE can't afford, from a ratings perspective, to tone down the product on RAW and Smackdown to make the pay-per-views seem superior because they don't want to run the risk of losing those casual viewers who tune in on Mondays and Fridays to other shows and networks. Monday is an action packed night for television, and if RAW isn't at the top of it's game every week, the casual fan is going to go off and watch House, 24, Monday Night Football or whatever else is on. THAT, in a relative nut shell, is what's wrong with WWE pay-per-views and their buy rates right now.

I really don't think that the internet plays into it all that much. Sure, there are some fans out there that will hook up with an illegal stream (and let's be clear, it is stealing, plain and simple) to watch for free, but most won't. Personally, I go to the movie theaters and watch with 30 or so other people for $13 bucks. It's fun, cheaper than ordering at home and you get a great atmoshpere with other fans and a great screen to watch on.

It's also important to consider, and I realize this answer is reaching novel level proportions here, that the WWE just isn't that popular to the mainstream audience right now, regardless of what they tell us on RAW every week. So when you combine that with the fact that there are 13 pay-per-views every year (and I'm not even going to get into the quality of those pay-per-views, and the booking of the gimmicks that so many of them have. That's an essay like answer in itself), it's just too much.

WWE's program ratings are bad today. WWE does not care. There is a reason. They have sponsors. They have sponsors which give them about the same amount of ratings back then. Today, it has barely anything to do with internet for solely ratings. Most people have cable or satellite or if they hack into there neighbor's service. The only streams that affect WWE is the PPV streams. If there was no streams, WWE would be making like 25,000 more PPV buys or so. WWE gets bad PPV buys from the streams. PPV's are WWE's biggest money makers. They earn a lot more from PPV than a Raw for a year. WWE's general poor ratings is from the product is not as good as it use to be in the late nineties. WWE had the best promos, the best feuds, which wanted to make you watch the show. Vince Russo the creator of the Attitude Era and he was the genius to help WWE win some . I had read an article that WWE will change soon. So the ratings I bet will increase

It has nothing to do with it being watch online. Even the merchandise sales are low. The reason why they have poor ratings is because a lot of top stars have retired or quit, and WWE has not been creating new talent that can fill the gap left behind by great wrestlers like Austin, Rock, Micheals, Angle, Mankind, etc. And that's causing viewers to turn away. The last, big, new star WWE created is John Cena and that was years ago. Randy Orton has become a big wrestling star, but the general public still doesn't know who he is. Cena has hit the main stream.

There is just a lack of stars like Austin, Rock, and Hogan that can simply pull in the non wrestling fans and turns them into ones. One of the reasons for this is because WWE bookers and writers do not allow a wrestler as much freedom to express themselves as they once did, even Austin commented on this. Thus, it's more difficult, if not impossible, to break through as a mega star. Besides Cena, that guy does not exist in the current WWE roster.

And the new talents are not performing their best as well. When you think of great matches, it's the same guys who have been carrying the company for years. Their product has decreased in quality due to lack of competition. In the late 90's, WWE and WCW were going head to head. Competition leads to innovation, which leads to a better product. WWE has got rid of all their competition. The only wrestling organization left is TNA, and they can not compete with WWE.

Again, you just said it.

Internet plays a BIG part of the decline in ratings. Back in the 80's (Hogan Era) the closes thing people had to spoiler's was wrestling magazines. They didn't have internet that ruined the many good surprises wrestling had. When a wrestler returns , 90% of spoiler's sites report it 2-3 weeks in advance and totally ruin the momentum and surprise. Because of the internet, many people want to know the insides of the wrestling business and everything that leaks out. So wrestling companies like TNA and WWE have to go to greater length's to swerve around the internet.

It's hard for heels to get over with all the dirt sheets, spoiler sites or their wiki page's explaining there whole life. Thus giving smarks a reason to cheer them. Spoiler sites have ruined SD's ratings, with then posting what's going to happen before the show every week, what's the thrill in watching it? Even in the Attitude Era when the internet was maturing and everyone had slow AOL, there weren't much spoiler sites, which really kept the element of surprise. Plus Vince admitting that wrestling was kayfabe and calling wrestling "Entertainment" didn't help it either. That honestly played a part in the decline of ratings also. They is no denying as the internet evolved, it killed kayfabe.

Its a valid point about the ratings but i think the reason for the lower ratings with comparison to the attitude era is it was a popular 1st. Like Hogan was a 1st in the early 80s which was a huge draw, the off the page ultra pg14 was also a 1st and very popular by nature.

If The Miz and Orton were feuding PG14 and Cena wasnt there, other fans other than kids would take it more seriously and be emotionally involved.

Nobody is emotionally involved now and instead they just observe and mainly moan cos they have seen better.

But the ratings are a result of WWE not being must see and ppl watching it whilst on wrestling forums.

BQ. The tagteam hiac match on Raw between Taker and Austin vs Kane and Mankind. match never started but austin kicking as5 on top of the cell was woah!

Its all been seen now, all been done.

The Miz is that rare performer that comes once in a blue moon who has just the right amount of in-ring capability and on-mic skills. He's well on his way to becoming an in-ring general and his mic skills are phenomenal. I remember a promo he cut against MVP where he started backstage talking about how JBL hated him and how the WWE universe never gave him a chance and made his way to the ring where he was met with MVP knocking him on his butt. That was the moment i knew this guy could be WWE champion. I don't know how he'll work out as a babyface, but he definetely has the heel role down path! Another thing, when he won the belt, TMZ and other mainstream news outlets picked up on the story because of his Real World affiliation. He has those mainstream ties that no one else has because he started his career in reality TV. I hope WWE capitalizes on this because he has potential to be one of the most hated champions in history.

The internet is not affecting RAW (or any WWE show) ratings. The vast majority of the WWE's audience are "casual" viewers, that is, they watch it because it's easy to find, the time is constant and doesn't jump all over the schedule, and they know what they're getting when they tune in to a WWE show. The WWE is "comfort food" for the casual fan, but not a requirement to sustain life as it is for the hardcore fans.

Those who go to the trouble to watch "streams" are the young fans you find in forums like this one. A VERY small portion of the "WWE universe". They are a VERY vocal minority but they don't affect ratings enough to matter, there just aren't enough of them to do that.

Your...scale...is a bit off. 8.4 is not 8.4 million but rather 8.4 percent of the people who could have watched that show actually did watch it. 8.4 probably translates into something more like 13 or 14 million. RAW averages AROUND 2.8 - 3.0 in the ratings, probably something like 4 - 4.5 million people watching each week. A respectable number of fairly constant viewers. Certainly not the number the boom time of the late 90's did, but a good healthy number anyway. And it does stay pretty constant.

The ratings are down a bit now (and PPV buys) simply because the WWE has gotten repetitious and isn't finding any new "Stone Cold" or "The Rock" to capture the imaginations of new fans. There really isn't any compelling reasons to watch the WWE these days. The cast is the same, the plotlines are the same, the featured players are the same. Some of the casual viewers have grown bored with the WWE and have moved on to something else.

It isn't that fabled "downward cycle" that some speak of. Vince just needs a new "Stone Cold" to spark the interest of those who have gotten bored and moved on. The WWE is, and always has been, all about characters, with storylines being a fairly close second. These days, there just isn't that one special performer to get excited about.

BQ: Probably that surreal segment that saw saw Stone Cold and The Rock in the middle of the ring...serenading each other. Just plain weird. But very entertaining.

Yes, the ratings are going down because of Internet. However, that is not the only reason. Another reason is because of the WWE Creative Team that produces bad storylines that people got tired of. Also, WWE has lost many fans to UFC due to it's change to the PG rating and people realizing wrestling is "fake" whereas UFC is real.

BQ: Stone Cold Beer Bash from RAW in 1999

YouTube Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9e16aPesHo0

No I don't think people watching online do have much of an effect on the number of people watching Raw, Raw is free and accessible after all. If we are talking PPV rates i could understand that, doesn't matter how good the product is there will always be a part of the crowd unwilling to pay when they can get it for free but when talking about Raw... its on TV for free anyway so why watch a stream unless you can't afford a TV? If you can't afford a TV but your online you have bigger thing to worry about than watching wrestling.

I don't think its really the product as much as it is the times, lets face it wrestling isn't cool. In the Monday night wars, wrestling was the hot ticket. It was THE thing to be talking about, who's side you where on mattered and you could stand arguing in the playground ALL break about why WCW was better than that overly dramatic crap the WWF did... sorry brief flashback to my childhood. Point is back then wrestling was cool, now its just not. You can't explain why but times move on, MMA took off and once Austin and The Rock left a lot of teens left with them because they weren't really wrestling fans.

During the monday night wars you had a lot of fans who just watched for a few small aspects of the show, the skits or the characters and once wrestling tried to move away from doing the same stuff over and over with the same people. You see them here, "wrestling was only good when we had The Rock and Austin". People like that are not fans of wrestling they are fans of Austin and The Rock, a wrestling fan can find good in almost any wrestling they watch. The attitude era created a mass of fair weather "fans" who claimed they loved wrestling when it was fart and penis jokes but now they call wrestling and its fans "gay", i love that logic i really do. Vince McMahon taking about his grapefruits and DX bragging about the size they are packing isn't gay at all for a male wrestling fan in his teens to enjoy but they take all that away and suddenly wrestling is gay... Enough said on that really. These fans made up a large part of the audience back then, they hadn't watched wrestling before but because it was cool and because the war was big news they joined in. Soon as WCW was bought out the ratings started to slide, slowly but they did. Wrestling stopped being the hot topic as such those fair weather fans got bored and moved on.

MMA is a massive reason for the ratings drop because that became the next hot topic, its great because its real. Now the same people who loved The Rock say John Cena is ruining fake gay wrestling. Wrestling hasn't changed, its the same idea's within the same context. The WWE hasn't changed all that much, the TV rating means little, its still bad comedy skits and a lot of talking but take away a few swear words and the masses turn away. Which is fine, wrestling can survive on these numbers. if you look at the WWWF, WWF, WWE's history the numbers during the attitude era are a massive anomaly. Its not what you would call the standard, its a once in a life time spike that chasing would just create a desperate downfall of any company. What the WWE is doing now is just sticking to doing what they know, its fairly smart because you can't recreate once in a life time things. If the WWE found a New Rock or Austin would it create the same interest? No because the WWE isn't at war with WCW, the rivalry pushed the ratings as much as the stars did.

At the end of the day the times have changed more then wrestling has, stars come and go, the WWE has settled into doing what they know best. Older fans have moved on to the next cool thing but there will always be a strong fan base. With DVR and the internet its possible to catch up on what you have missed, there is no need to worry about being there to watch it live, with spoilers for some shows its pointless even watching because you know whats happening without seeing it.

Times have changed, things are easier to follow and not miss thanks to the internet. Wrestling will always be a constant but you can't repeat that which took a life of its own. Most "fans" will be hung up on what it use to be but you can't just redo it for the same results, it never works like that.

BQ: In my time I think I'd say when Triple H was revealed as the man that attacked Shawn Michaels in the car park.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_4Ctdp9fDM

Wrestling is the ultimate hula-hoop; ratings go up and down, interest goes up and down, critics predict doom and gloom & in a year or two it's back on top. With the Internet, and some time in the near future we will have hand-held PC's and wi-fi in almost every area, so businesses will begin charging for PPV's over this (r)evolutionary net.