From the A1 Message Boards: Me and Jerseyboy on the Money in the Bank Buyrate

Don't worry 'bout Punk
Photo Credit: WWE.com

Normally, I hate talking about things like buyrates and ratings. Like Jason Mann said, they're boring. However, sometimes, you get dragged into conversations with people who take those sorts of things seriously. In addition to my post on why I don't think they need to be taken seriously at Fair to Flair, I got into it a little bit at A1-Wrestling with the people reacting to ratings and getting a bit in a tizzy because ratings haven't shot up.

I posted the now-determined-to-be incorrect buyrate for Money in the Bank, which was actually really good, before I was corrected by poster and sometimes TWB commenter KoppoKick bringing up Meltzer's analysis of the sheets bringing the number down a bit. The correct number, 185K as compared to the erroneous number of 276K, was still pretty good, at least I thought. Here's the passage of three posts over there that I think dictates why, regardless of how "good" or "not good" the numbers are, why, again, we shouldn't really worry about the business side when it comes to what they're going to do on the side we SHOULD care about, i.e. the shows themselves. Two of my posts will sandwich one by poster and regular TWB commenter Jerseyboy, with whom I may disagree from time to time. Despite that, he really is smart when it comes to this kind of thing, and I'm glad he reads and comments.

Yes, this will be directly C&Ped from the A1 board, but I think it's worth sharing. At least I hope you think it's worth sharing.

Me:

[Referring to the discrepancy between the originally reported 276K and the real 185K] It just goes to show that wrestling journalism has a long way to go, and wrestling fans such as myself have a long way to go before trusting any of these sites. My bad.

That being said, 185K is still a good number.

Jerseyboy:

I agree. To me, it meant that Punk/Cena had some juice.

The big thing that people need to keep in mind is that if there's going to be business turnaround with Punk as the centerpiece, it isn't going to happen overnight. Again, the things to look at over the next 3-6 months aren't the TV ratings so much, but to see if there's a bump in PPV buyrates and house show attendance and merchandise sales. If Punk means something, that's where the initial bump's [sic] going to come from.

Of course, the WWE might look at ratings and a less than expected PPV number and decide Punk needs to be shunted back down the card. But I'm thinking at this point that they're pretty much out of options and will go all the way with him.

Because if you move Punk back to the mid-card, who do you move up in his place? Exactly.

Me again:

Yeah, I think you're right in that they won't move him back down for whatever reason. They're already seeing the initial bumps in merch. MitB was slightly up, from this time last year, which is still up. Ratings are ratings, but in the last two months, they've been mostly stable. Plus, as Triple H gets more influence, I think the decision making might turn more rational over the long term. I think Punk will be fine.

Normally, I don't care about this kind of thing, but I posted the number just to try and allay concerns (before I found out that I had bitten on a bad one, again, my fault there) that something that we found good was going to continue to pay dividends and that really, we should probably stop worrying about the business end of things. 10 million people watch the Jersey Shore. Is that a measurement of how enjoyable that program is going to be to you? Hardly. Therefore, why should it matter how many people consume wrestling if what the company is producing is good? And unlike Fatty, there really isn't a consensus on this angle being good or bad (although most people I interact with have loved the last two months with hiccups here and there).

If WWE was proving to be reactionary, then they wouldn't have put Punk over Cena at MitB, they wouldn't have put him over Cena again at SummerSlam, and they wouldn't have programmed him against someone who is so obviously hateable and polarizing the other way that everyone, not just the "Attitude Era holdovers", men and anti-Cena crowd, would cheer him. Say what you want about Nash and Punk being programmed against him, but again, the logic there isn't to bury Punk or put him out of mind. It's to get everyone to cheer the man, and it's a prelude into a potential feud with the boss. Whether you think Nash should have been the segue into that or whether you think that a boss/employee feud in 2011 is a good idea is one thing, but I think it's undeniable that Punk is a priority to WWE right now.

This is program #1 or at least #1a (with Cena/del Rio being #1). The moment that Punk gets thrown back to the Dolph Zigglers and Kanes of the world is when we start panicking, at least in my estimation. But again, I'll be utterly shocked if that happens. Call me myopic. Call me overly optimistic. Call me a "WWE fanboy" (like that means anything among adults in 2011, even if there wasn't a shitload of evidence to prove that I come down on what I feel is bad wrestling regardless of company) even. Just don't call me late for dinner. But I have a really good feeling about the direction of WWE right now, and when it's all said and done, I really feel like come WrestleMania time, CM Punk is going to be fully integrated into the main event firmament.

I think that's a passage worth relaying. Again, numbers are numbers, and even if they do affect what they put on the screen, you always have the option to vote with your own remote control and not watch. Life's not long enough to the point where worrying about the performance indicators of WWE is worth it.

Also, I encourage you, like I always have, to sign up for an account at A1-Wrestling and post there. It's a really good community with great discussion for wrestling and so much more.

Destination Success: Impact Wrestling and the Power of Margins

Note, I usually don't like to do pieces analyzing the business side anymore. I find that microanalyzing buyrates or ratings can get really pedantic. However, I feel like with this one, there's a great point to be made.

Brian Kendrick, foundation of a better Impact
Photo Credit: ImpactWrestling.com

Anyway, the buyrate numbers for Destination X are in, or as in as they can be for a company that is under no obligation to release its numbers publicly. Apparently, the buys were somewhat dismal, albeit comparatively speaking to their recent forays into PPV, they were par for the course. Conservative estimates place the number of buys at 8,000, about 500 fewer than their previous PPV, Slammiversary. That might sound like a failure, but as K. Sawyer Paul pointed out, it really wasn't in the grand scheme of things.

While the number didn't spike like some of us here might have hoped, I still think that DX was very much a success for the company, or at least a success for the maligned-by-management X-Division. We can very much agree that the difference between 8,500 and 8,000 is almost negligible in the grand scheme of things, right? So basically, DX and Slammiversary did almost the same number of buys. Assuming that the pre-wage overhead for both PPVs was the same, the rest of the costs are going to be determined by the monies paid out to the talent. The biggest name on the show in terms of a wage was Samoa Joe, Abyss or AJ Styles. Most of the wrestlers fall under the pay grade of "might have to apply for food stamps if miss more than one date", which means they're cheap. Meanwhile, Slammiversary had wages drawn by some of the heavy hitters in terms of salary. Ken Anderson, Kurt Angle, Sting, Scott Steiner, Bully Ray and one of the only Knockouts reputed to be making a decent wage in Mickie James were all on the card. Replacing them with guys like the Young Bucks, Austin Aries, Zema Ion, Mark Haskins, Shark Boy and Alex Shelley had to have brought costs down significantly, right?

So while the people who apparently don't like the X-Division in the front office might use this 5.9% as ammunition against putting more of a spotlight on these guys, what they don't realize is that it's very much a condemnation of the actual power the former TNA has in the marketplace, especially that of the supposed "stars" they have in the fold. If Angle and Sting and Anderson are only worth 500 more buys than Aries and Ion and Haskins, then is it fair to say that maybe their drawing power worth the exponential increase in salary, especially given that the former group has expenses taken care of as well while the latter group must self-fund to get from show to show? Looking at the margins, it has to make some kind of sense to people that maybe going cheaper and going younger might just be the road to take.

KSP closes his post with "The X Division guys aren't the ones who should be worrying about their jobs." In a fair world, that would be the case, but Impact Wrestling throughout its history has shown that don't make the best business decisions all the time. However, they really need to take a good, hard look at the way things are run. Maybe that whole "the Network is mandating the push for the X-Division" trope that ran on Impact last week is more shoot than not. Maybe the faith in Brian Kendrick, Shelley and Aries is real and a sign of things to come. But you'd have to forgive me if my faith in a bunch of stubborn men with their minds entrenched firmly in 1998 isn't as strong as it is in other promotions' booking (and I'm not even talking WWE here). If the rumors of spite and thickheadedness are true, then Impact is once again about to react to "bad" numbers in order to submarine change.

The thing is, for me, the best parts of Impact are when the X-Division is featured by itself. Not the bullshit Bischoff-is-trying-to-kill angle, but the one that's featuring Shelley and Kendrick dealing with a marauding Aries. To me, even when they're not wrestling, it's an intriguing angle. The quality's better, mainly because it's an issue among three guys based on a story that involves issues that are wholly in character. No one is shooting. No one is doing it for the respect of "the boys in the back" or for "stroke". All three, especially Aries who's awesome and Kendrick, whose character actually fits him, (key word, CHARACTER) are intriguing to me. The best part is that the blowoff is going to happen in the ring in what should be a match that at least tries to be innovative and entertaining.

I know some of that is subjective. I know that not everyone is going to go for the X-Division, but at the same time, forging ahead with the innovative in-ring stuff while having simple angles out of the ring, but teasing that direction has worked in the past. The Joe/Daniels/Styles stuff wasn't exactly fully capitalized on either. Meanwhile, the warmed over faux-Attitude/Monday Night Wars rehashing has been proving to drive the fan interest into the ground. So, when presented with two numbers that are somewhat similar, shouldn't you want to explore the thing that hasn't been tread upon instead of the thing that has been producing declining numbers over the months?

But again, Impact hasn't been known for its business prowess, especially when the money mark of an owner's representative eternally has a certain Noo Yawker in her ear about what makes good wrestling. It's a shame too, because Impact has a chance to try and give something to the fans while taking in something in return.

And hell, if the business model grew, maybe they could afford to pay Jesse Neal and the rest of the crew enough money so that they would get a paycheck even when they missed dates because of injury, y'know?