Hi all, and welcome to my first ever “Repeat Column”. Unlike my Devil’s Advocate offerings done shortly after a previous column and arguing the other side, this week I am returning to an issue I first looked at six months ago and analysing how things have changed.
With WWE now a publicly traded company and continually looking to expand into new areas (like recent advancements into films and library DVDs), maximising both revenue and profit levels is a very important strategy. It comes as little surprise that if given the chance to both increase the number of PPV events a year and their price, then they would do it. After all, if you can get 250,000 new buys from holding an extra event at $35, that’s nearly $9 million in extra revenue. Or, if you can increase the price of an existing event from $35 to $40 and still get 250,000 buys that’s an increase in $1.25 million in extra revenue per event. If you can then do that across say 15 PPV events a year, that’s nearly $19 million for the entire financial year! The incentive for doing this if they can is huge. It’s about pushing us the consumer into spending as much money as we possibly can, but without us turning around and stopping altogether. It’s kind of like they are organising a game of Chicken between our wallets and our need to budget!
In my first column I argued that the PPV Market was in danger of being flooded. Since then, yet even more have been added to the calendar with the establishment of ECW as a third brand and therefore the need for their own pay-per-views too. On the surface, it makes sense to add more not just to increase money coming in, but with three brands instead of two now, there are more talents craving airtime. So in principal at least, this would seem like a prosperous move but there has been in my opinion a major flaw.
The idea of dramatically increasing the number of Pay Per View events a year came from the Monday Night Wars, with both WCW and WWE going from 3 events a year to 12 or one a month in a bid to obtain more money from their shared customer base for themselves. This meant that there were 24 PPV events to choose from each year, but of course unless you were a tremendously rich and dedicated fan of professional wrestling in general, as opposed to a fan of one over the other, you would only buy at most half of them! Fast forward to today and essentially, the WWE holds less than 24 events a year. In fact, if I have done my sums correctly, the addition of ECW’s December to Dismember makes it 16 this calendar year. But because we associate all three brands as essentially part of the larger WWE, we feel pressured to buy them all.
So this brings us back to the concept of why the brand extension was done in the first place. For starters, at WWE’s end there was obviously the logistical issue of coping with so much talent on their roster, but then again they were never really obliged to keep everyone from WCW. If they had wanted, they could have released a huge proportion of talents from both WCW and the old WWF and made one small, elite roster, but instead they chose the route they did. So why might they have done it? Because the two rosters were encouraged to have two distinct styles in order to cater for that WCW fan that wasn’t really a fan of the current WWE product. WWE wanted to take WCW’s market as well as their assets when they were gone of course! Even today, everyone exchanging their views on the net are happy to point out the differences in style between Raw and Smackdown. In short, we were never expected to follow both brands unless we were really dedicated.
But of course that never stops the WWE from trying to get us to spend money following both, which is why we get the Raw and Smackdown Rebounds during the other’s shows. It’s why we get joint Pay Per View events and it’s why since the introduction of the third ECW brand we have seen an awful lot more cross-brand events, feuds and matches. Sure it was initially to help get ECW off to a good start, but why not take the opportunity to increase the following on all three brands in general? However this created a major flaw to the plan, as consequently this meant that the top tier talent occupied the top spots on all three shows and therefore all three brand’s Pay Per Views. Now if all the cards week in and week out feel generally the same, why would we want to watch shows we have to pay extra for, especially when we get so much of them every week already?
It’s ironic that for all the calls on the internet over the years for the brand extension to be abolished, when in a weird way we do get that, something suffers in its place! The problem is that it goes against the principal of variety that the WWE has been pushing since the separate rosters began. It’s OK if they dominate our screens with more programming a week than ever before but providing we can favour one brand over the others! Whilst the WWE are simply trying to make us feel loyal to all three brands, fans were rarely loyal to both WWE and WCW simultaneously, so why should we be dedicated followers of Raw, Smackdown and ECW?
So returning to the ideas discussed at the start of the column, maybe it’s not an issue of making us spend more than ever, but maybe an attempt to appeal to more wrestling fans than ever and allowing us to choose what we like according to our preferences? After all it’s all WWE in some form, so why should they care which one we choose to follow? If that is the case, then the increase in Pay Per View events and the amount they charge for each one is necessary in order to compensate for the slight reduction in viewing figures that they might suffer. For example, if they used to have 250,000 people spend $35 on a Pay Per View and the next year increase it to $40 because people are choosing between different PPV events held by different brands, then so long as they get about 220,000 people buying the event, they still make about the same amount of money! But then on top of that, if they are holding extra events for one-brand fans to buy, then that’s an extra event where they make extra money and so overall profits increase.
So has it really been a new Pay Per View crisis? The quality of the cards in the last few months has been debateable and in some places rather repetitive and the same, but hopefully after Survivor Series, the three brands will start to go their separate ways again and the WWE can get back on track to what was otherwise a very good plan. The truth is that unless the wrestling market dramatically decreases, with the amount of WWE programming available on television these days we have no choice but to accept separate rosters. Their merger would very quickly bring about the implosion of the WWE because there would be no variety. To combat it, WWE would have to reduce their programming, their Pay Per View events and so forth and why on earth would they want to do that? That means considerably less money! So if ever you are in a bit of a tight spot because you aren’t sure you want to splash out on yet another WWE Pay Per View, just remember we were never expected to follow it all in the first place. It’s just nice if we do. A new Pay Per View crisis? No, just a bit of a mishap, is all.
Just a thought…
“Just A Thought…” tries to think about the impact professional wrestling has on the lives of those associated with it at all the different levels. Please feel free to send any thoughts about this column, good bad or indifferent to stuart_black@hotmail.com. I will do my best to get back to you, particularly if you get me thinking myself, but even if you don’t.
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