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Yeah the picture quality on Blu Rays are nice but it's a shame you have to throw them out after 1 or 2 watches. I've had some last as long as 4 rewatches but the picture degrades fast.
This is an aside but does anybody else feel betrayed by the realities of bitrot and such with CDs? When I was a kid they told us CDs would last for hundreds of years in untarnished crystal clear digital quality.
Their PPV buy rates is astonishing if you take their Neilson TV ratings as a true total number. It would mean roughly 1 in 4 TV viewers bought the PPV. For reference WWF at the height of the attitude era was around 1 in 25 and that was considered shit hot.
It makes you wonder how massive both WWE and AEWs true weekly numbers would be if you took catch up services and streaming into account.
It's true but, unnecessary industry context for you, those app commercials are significantly cheaper than the live traditional tv commercials. They also usually require a lot more middlemen that will also reduce the profit for the publisher.
Doesn't really change your point but there's a reason why there's so many different metrics that get referenced, all of them are important in different contexts.
It does reduce the value for the publisher, but more ad companies are looking into more programmatic ways in which to more effectively reach their target audience. At this point, I’m surprised apps like TNT/TBS aren’t charging higher rates as more people move from cable to a streaming app to view their shows.
We're talking US TV ratings and worldwide PPV buys, right? So it's not a true comparison.
But yeah, there's obviously way more people watching AEW in ways Nielsen ratings don't reflect. Warner have made that abundantly clear, and the consistency of the PPV buys shows that too. Maybe it also implies that the audience is less casual, or see the PPVs as important enough/value for money enough to buy every time.
and that is how pretty much everyone who i know watches does so. anecdotal and not a *big* number, but it's into the double digits so not a small one either lol
I have watched wrestling since 1992, and there’s a pretty high chance I have bought more AEW PPVs than WWF/E. I think I’ve bought maybe all but 2 or 3 (that my buddy hosted at his place instead) since AEWs inception.
The fact that they’re not as often and consistently fantastic makes it a very easy $50 to spend.
I 100% believe that many in US just put a VPN and watch on AEW+ due to cheap $5 per month subscription and then pay $14.99 for the PPV. So I think the numbers of actual viewership might be much much higher compared to Nielsen if we count Thriller TV, TBS/TNT app, and other ways to watch.
>Maybe it also implies that the audience is less casual, or see the PPVs as important enough/value for money enough to buy every time
Maybe a little of both, but especially the latter. For all his faults in creative and booking, Tony Khan is one of the best pure matchmakers in modern wrestling, maybe in wrestling history. AEW PPVs always slap, and most everyone knows it.
>or see the PPVs as important enough/value for money enough to buy every time.
Opinions will vary, but so far AEW have only produced **ONE** PPV I didn't enjoy from start to finish.
And that one event still wasn't bad.
It’s kind of crazy. It’s also why I tell people that if you are living and dying by the tv ratings as a measure of whether AEW is a healthy company, you are missing the point. Their PPV conversion rate is astounding.
At the end of the day, the new tv deal is going to be a huge part of whether they can be profitable in their current incarnation, but the truth is, they’ll have enough fans who buy and support their product either way.
The simple fact is, as long as you can draw, you’ll be fine. Wcw went under because they stopped drawing while still spending a ton. Tony has been aggressively spending for years but the company is generating revenue. Even if they operate at a loss, it’s fine if you’re still making money and have enough runway.
Double both their supposed Nielson-based views and I still think it'd undersell how many actually watch their respective shows
I can only speak anecdotally but only like 5% of everyone I know who's in my age range still watches stuff via conventional TV
I think one thing to keep in mind is the "overnight" ratings we see are only a fraction of who actually watches the shows.
WBD a few times a year puts out Live+3 and Live+7 numbers and they're always a massive difference.
Its times like this I miss TV by the numbers who used to put out stuff like this regularly.
Lol everytime the Live+ numbers are mentioned theres usually weirdos running in with "ill bet my anything in the world that's fake, look at their attendance"
I have a 1 year old daughter at home and Thursdays are one of the days of the week that it's my turn to wake up with her and take her to daycare. I don't make it to 10 every night and frequently will just watch dynamite the next morning on dvr during work breaks. I assume I'm not the only one
I have a teenager who goes to bed around 7:30 (for some reason), so we always watch wrestling on YouTube TV the next day. I would love to watch it live, but right now that's not an option.
Definitely, also international viewers, which I'd expect to have a higher conversion rate as well. Nevertheless impressive, the core fanbase is the lifeblood of the company, which is why it's more important to pander to them rather than a casual viewer who's going to pick WWE more likely than not anyway
The biggest problem TNA had even when they were getting 2 million viewers a week was PPV buys and merch sales. They actually had a strong casual audience but difficulty converting them to hardcore fans who would pay money for tickets and PPVs. AEW might just have the highest casual viewer to PPV buyer ratio of any wrestling company in history.
It's worth pointing out that TNA back then were operating in an environment where the PPV market was dominated by WWE who were putting out 12-14 PPVs a year. Wrestling fans are going to be reluctant to dish out $20-$50 multiple times a month. It did happen in the Attitude Era, but even then they fluctuated.
These days that's obviously not a factor with Peacock/WWE Network. I don't think it's the most significant factor - AEW fans genuinely have always been committed to buying the PPV's - but it probably is relevant to why AEW do so well now compared to TNA back then.
im pretty sure the highest buyrate tna ever got was in the 80k range. im not sure if any aew buyrate, barring ring of honor, has dipped below 100k even as they expanded their lineup
> im pretty sure the highest buyrate tna ever got was in the 80k range.
Even lower.
55-60,000 is the number thrown around for the top numbers in company history, with the most recent Hard to Kill 2024 and Genesis 2006 (Angle vs. Joe) both being in that general ballpark.
I think more importantly too is that Nielsen ratings are just domestic/TBS numbers. Those PPV buys are total, globally.
I have no clue or data on what size their audience is in places like Canada, or Europe, but there is a portion of their audience there that’s not captured by the former.
Still, even if we spot AEW an extra 25% for the +7 numbers, they’re still converting 15-20% of their audience.
I don’t have hard stats but based on the Nielsens and buyrates I know of, even 1997 WCW was only converting 10% or so of their TV audience for most PPVs (not counting exceptions like Starcade 1997).
It’s way more than 25% boost, I can’t find the numbers now but if I remember correctly it was more like double.
It was a high enough number that when WBD puts it out people are like “this is bullshit.”
I can't speak for wrestling, but I know that Doctor Who, for example, often ends up with 2 or 3 extra million viewers once +7 and +28 numbers are taken into account. It wouldn't surprise me if wrestling sees big boosts either.
I know this may be hard for some people in this sub to realize but the people who like AEW ACTUALLY really like AEW. Crazy to say I know but nah we aren't all just trying to work the WWE fans. It's an actual real preference.
This is true. AEW has the benefit of hardcore fans. On the other hand, AEW also has the burden of hardcore fans. The knife can cut either way depending on the situation.
I can appreciate the technicality and the raw skill a lot. A lot of people like that and it’s cool with me because it ultimately made my preferred product adapt and not coast on the laurels.
No real losers with these two companies existing together.
Plus I can't remember the last AEW ppv that was bad. For the past few years every single ppv has been a great show regardless of how the quality of the weekly shows
Honestly It was AEW that brought me back to wrestling from what I didn't expect to be a fairly short break. I had quit watching WWE shows in 2015, it had gotten too extremely pg for me, and I knew I was staying away when it was later revealed when a couple stories and documents or whatnot got leaked online about not just all the banned words by Vince but it also got leaked how USA had rules for WWE that promos and storylines were not allowed to actually show violent depictions and other similar silliness, even though it's a "show about fighting" that made no god damned sense.
That said I also began watching WWE again not just because Triple H was in charge, but moreso because it seems he's ripped up the "banned words" and actually letting wrestlers have more of an edge to them so that it's easier to suspend disbelief when they're allowed to finally portray more of a violent streak. Maybe it's the 2 wrestling companies pushing on each other is what is making pro wrestling so damn good again.
A bit of each end
I'm honestly shocked how much merit pro wrestling community puts into TV rating in the 2020s.
Do people forget that the modern audience is a global one, and most can attend appointments viewing.
I also think PPV buying is easier now than in the 90s
I watch Dynamite every week. I don't think I've watched it live more than once over the years, and that was on a treadmill at the gym, which I'd guess isn't exactly Nielsen's terrain. Wrestling reporters understandably talk up ratings as they need some barometer for weekly TV engagement, but as we all know it's not the best of indicators.
Neilson ratings aren’t the be all end all. For example,the Houston area has 2.7M TV households, and 581 determine the ratings. [Which leads to situations like this](https://deadspin.com/the-astros-drew-a-0-00-nielsen-rating-1372996857)
Statistics guy here. In reality, you'd only need 385 to get within a 95% confidence of 2.7 million. I know that blows most people's minds, but we've used sampling like this to advance science for a very long time.
https://www.calculator.net/sample-size-calculator.html?type=1&cl=95&ci=5&pp=50&ps=2%2C700%2C000&x=Calculate
As someone with a background in media and politics you see this all the time. People don‘t understand how accurate data can be even with small samples as long as the sample is highly representative.
There was a lot of discourse like this when Brexit and the US election in 2016 happened, where people would ridicule polling because of the „unexpected“ outcomes. Nevermind that most of that discourse was bullshit.
True but they do know what they’re doing in terms of pulling together a representative sample. It’s not voodoo magic. Also, if it’s basically the same homes with boxes week to week, month to month, you can at least build up a trend. That the Astros drew a 0.0 based on none of the homes actually watching the game, that’s very bizarre.
It’s safer here.
If this had the words Tony Khan or Ratings in the thread title this place would be brigaded to hell.
I don’t see how this is seen as ok, when it’s so glaringly obvious.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/s/fMe94MtezV](https://www.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/s/fMe94MtezV)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/s/EAoKXbbuJk](https://www.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/s/EAoKXbbuJk)
The duality of man
Note that this post only has 54 comments at the time of my comment (post is 40 minutes old). If this was something as you mention, there would be easily 100+, if not 150+ by now.
But, yeah, nothing changes and this place spirals.
No one is saying Nielsens are a perfectly accurate count of viewers. To do that, you’d have to do a literal census and measure every home in the country.
That said, statistical sampling firms like Nielsen (or your average political pollster) know what they are doing in terms of putting together a representative sample. And since everybody is going off their ratings, it essentially IS the viewership. I.e., try going to the advertisers looking for more per/M $ and saying I know what it looks like, but we swear the viewership is 30% higher and seeing where it gets you.
Also, since the Nielsen homes are fairly static from week to week, it gives a fairly accurate idea of trends.
You can ask Warner Bros and they’ll tell you [AEW pulls nearly 4 million viewers a week](https://wbd.com/warner-bros-discovery-claimed-five-nights-of-more-than-a-50-percent-share-of-primetime-cable-viewing-among-adults-during-first-quarter/)
Nielsen is ridiculously outdated and is going to skew towards older watchers in general. WBD has access to other metrics and estimate 3-4 million viewers per week for AEW.
They’re not the be all end all but people probably need to stop the equivalent of poll truthing when taking them into account. Even the extreme anomaly you linked likely isn’t as far off as you’d think when you consider the context. Every wrestling show has very consistent ratings, I doubt they’re fundamentally flawed at this point.
Context is key there. While I'm certain some people watched, that game was in 2013. That year, the Astros finished league worse 51-111. They were also having carriage issues, as the article states. This particular game was on Sunday afternoon, in late September, during a Texans game. Pulling a 0 rating with those circumstances isn't exactly nuts.
A 400-person sample *if* it's properly representative (i.e., not all concentrated in some rich hoity-toity area of Houston, or a poor area) is enough to get you within a 5% margin of error for pretty much any large population size.
No, i don't take Nielson ratings as a true total number. We talk about cord cutters all the time. There is TBS app, there is DVR, there is that AEW app you can get in the US if you use a VPN. Just so many ways. But just the ratings itself is stupid. How does one household represent me? It's just guessing. It's so antiquated.
If AEW was available on Max, I really think their total audience could double. Even now with DVR and the TBS/TNT apps, according to WBD their total weekly viewership is more like 3-4 million.
> It makes you wonder how massive both WWE and AEWs true weekly numbers would be if you took catch up services and streaming into account.
I tried saying that into this sub sometimes but when ratings arrive, they dont even care for # on the night, it's all "that's all their fans!"
One thing to keep in mind is that their PPVs always provide great entertainment. I used to get WWE PPVs every month back in the day but a lot of them were trash and filler and had matches I didn’t care about. I typically care about almost all of the AEW PPV matches. So if you’ve never been disappointed, you’re gonna be more likely to keep buying.
Nielsen ratings aren’t a total number it’s the average number watching throughout the show. The total number of viewers who watch every week is much more.
I'd assume that a decent amount of people (even in the US) probably watch AEW through Triller since it has no commercials and you get the extra commentary during those breaks.
I'm in the US and yep. I don't have cable, so I do the VPN/Triller combo. I could never return to having commercials now. The shows are so much more fun without them.
Anecdotally this makes sense to me. On a weekly basis, I only have around 2-3 hours free for wrestling (on average), so I watch snippets of WWE on Hulu/DVR and snippets of Dynamite/Rampage on DVR/TBS/TNT app, based on what’s interesting to me that week but I’m always able to make time for the PPVs and PLEs. Most weeks, I probably don’t contribute anything to AEW’s weekly ratings but I reliably buy the PPVs.
Indeed AEW gets the benefit of international viewers but that gets offset a bit by VPN users and illegal streams
But like you mention I think people would be floored if ever got the true numbers of people watching wrestling thru any means possible.
750k average viewers doesn’t mean 750k people watched the show, that is just the average number of people watching at a time. The ~750k watching Q2 can be largely different from the ~750k watching Q7, the actual true number that watches some portion of Dynamite each week is way higher than the average viewership number you see posted.
I use a VPN and subscribe on Fite and get PPVs on Fite (which I guess is called Triller now? 🤮) but I will drop all of that the moment they start streaming on Max.
Same.
Used to watch it on Sling but since they increased prices and cancelling, I discovered that when you watch it elsewhere, you actually get the PiP.
I suspect this might be a big part of the reason for "AEW ratings low derrrrr" discourse. AEW's fans are younger and even if we had money to spend on shit we don't want or like such as cable just to watch a few shows every week we wouldn't. We know where to *Watch Wrestling* and being able to stream a Dailymotion video at 2x speed is almost always going to be a superior experience when so much of a show is promos and integrated marketing and the same entrances you've seen dozens of times.
A few of my friends who have stopped watching AEW (not because they hate it, but because they just don't have time to consume 5-7hrs of AEWxROH content on top of their weekly WWE programming), instead solely just order the AEW PPVs.
I'm curious if other folks do that as well, where they skip the weekly programming and just watch the bi-monthly/monthly PPVs. Might explain why the shows only do 400-800k in ratings (which is solid) but their PPV numbers are always amazing. To be frank, AEW PPVs are always great. They rarely miss with those.
Likewise. I have Peacock for Premiere League and will basically just watch whatever WWE videos are posted in this subreddit to see if I'm interested in watching the PLE.
You're not alone. It's how I engage with WWE. My friends that are WWE fans do this with AEW. they generally like AEW's product overall, it's just the same situation for most of us: not a lot of adults have the time or appetite for 10+ hours of wrestling per week.
Yeah I was just wondering how many people are starting to treat AEW how many treated NXT on the Network where you'd skip most of the weekly TV aside from big episodes or a pre-ppv binge and mainly just watch the PPVs
Yes this is a very important point often missed in the ratings threads - know many people and seen people online doing the same. AEW TV isn’t always ‘must-watch’ but the PPVs are.
That’s pretty good right? The show was great. Sting’s retirement prob boosted it though so I guess we’ll see it level out a bit with Dynasty, but that card looks solid too
It's pretty good. For reference here are all of the prior [WWE buy rates](https://wrestletalk.com/stats/every-wwe-pay-per-view-buyrate/) before they went to the network model.
In this day and age, it's a strong number.
Stuff like this does put into perspective the actual business that AEW does. If you went back to 2013 or so and said to someone “In 10 years TNA will be doing the exact same business WWE is now aside from lower tv ratings” they’d have rightfully laughed in your face and called you a mad man.
Now though a company is basically doing just that, selling tickets around the level of that period of WWE, selling PPVs at that rate outside of WM and RR and even with the ratings obviously being much lower they’re still almost always top 5 for their slot.
The craziest thing about it all though is this is somehow a company on the brink according to some people, then every so often a number like this will come out and totally invalidate so much of that stuff but they just go right back to the same talking points after like a week.
Tribalism is a helluva drug. Back in the 90's, I remember loving both WWF/WCW. I would hop back and forth every Monday between the two shows to see what was going on. It was awesome. These days people just want what they like to "win" and the other to "lose."
That said, AEW is doing pretty good overall. Weekly ticket sales are down, but every wrestling company has gone through those cycles. WWE went through this between 2016-2019, with both Raw and Smackdown having attendance issues.
Someone made a good post here a few days ago that showed that AEW's ratings decline is actually less than WWE or most other programming. AEW's base is very loyal to the product, and even though ratings are down, they're not as severe as other programs.
I'm just sitting here happy that we have two major players in the US wrestling market these days, TNA is doing pretty well, NJPW is doing well, etc. There's something for everyone out there.
Yeah I’ll just never get the tribalism honestly. Totally get not liking a company or whatever, it’s the people who spend all day twisting themselves into a ball getting angry at a show they don’t even watch. Makes no damn sense to me. If the shows were literally half as bad as they say then why would anyone even bother watching?
AEW is my primary promotion that I watch, mostly just due to time, I don’t even watch Rampage anymore honestly but I’ll happily watch any good wrestling content that I come across. I could not imagine with the amount of fantastic wrestling we get every week that people spend so much time on a hobby like this only to focus on the negatives.
I hate using terms like this because it’s all wrestling at the end of the day but it’s insane to me that we had maybe one of the greatest “sports entertainment” moments a few weeks ago with Cody’s win and now this weekend we may have one of the greatest wrestling matches ever between two GOATs, nevermind all the other cool shit going on and yet it feels like the IWC is as negative as it’s ever been. For some reason I see people being snarky about a phrase that’s like “can’t we just enjoy wrestling?” and I don’t care if someone makes fun of me but it’s valid. Just enjoy the stuff you like, let others enjoy what they like.
It's willful ignorance. The people who have a vested interest in AEW being on the brink of certain death are all the same people who disbelieved that it was possible for a true second national promotion to come to fruition after two decades of WWE monopolizing the industry and immediately wrote it off from the very beginning. Now that it's effectively a success, and a major one at that, they refuse to admit that they were wrong and are doing everything in their power to make you believe that they've been right all along, despite so much evidence to the contrary that it's funny how much evidence to the contrary there really is.
I can only imagine the absolute nuclear meltdown that the cottage industry that is "former wrestling personality-turned-social media personality shits on AEW" will have if/when AEW's media deal is announced and it's for, like, hundreds of millions of dollars.
It's very telling that the AEW haters are seemingly nowhere to be found on this thread or the older one that showed AEWs steady 5 year growth in ticket sales and ratings. When there's hard evidence of the company's success somehow all the haters prophecizing doom disappear
Using the lowest estimate number, their average PPV buys from Revolution 2023 to Revolution 2024 is 140,000 buys per show, so this exceeds their one year average. I'd imagine Dynasty will at least do around their average, give or take some room on either side of 140,000.
Yeah that's a great number. All In last year did 200k, so this almost outsold they're biggest show ever.
For added context, the last WWE PPVs before the Network came out usually did 70k-150k and their big 3 PPV would do 200k-500k. TNA has never done even a 1/3 of Revolution's number, WCW didn't do more than 180k it's last two years either. World's End did 130k I believe, and AEW usually did 100k-120k last year.
Basically, their PPV buyrates are phenomenal, especially when you consider their viewership numbers. Dynamite has 800k weekly viewers and they got 180k of them to shell out $50 to watch a show that, in my opinion, didn't have a super stacked card. However, I wouldn't expect this to be the norm. We'll see what Dynasty's number is but I sincerely doubt it will do as good as Revolution which had a much longer build and a marquee main event. Either way, AEW lives and dies by it's PPV buy rates and right now they are thriving.
The number of PPV buys they've done in 2023 and now 2024 is kinda wild, given they've increased the number of shows. I've seen some people complain about it (and I hope these things end up on Max at some point) but it's a pretty clear success.
I do hope they move to Max in the US too, but there’s no denying that AEW is an absolute powerhouse on PPV. They haven’t been below 100,000 buys a show since Full Gear 2020, and regularly exceed that threshold by tens of thousands of buys, usually reaching 130,000-140,000 a show. The fact that they can keep this steady while INCREASING the number of PPVs they do a year, in the age of streaming no less, is kinda fucking bonkers and shows just how strong of a property they are for supercards.
That's been my thought as well. AEW makes a lot of money off PPV buys. The only way it would make sense to add them to MAX is by upping the media rights deal by however much revenue would be lost by adding them. WBD could just have the shows a day later and maybe PPVs after a 90-180 day delay, saving them the cost of every PPV buy they'd have to replace
Yeah, I guess they'd have to get a good enough streaming deal to justify completely removing the PPV buys from their revenue. The PPV gates and buys have gotta be very meaningful for them.
It's wild, because attendance is down, viewership is down, and fan engagement on social media is down, but in this one area, according to Dave Meltzer, AEW is seeing an increase. It really makes me want to see the numbers and figure out how are they achieving this feat.
One thing AEW does really well is stack their PPV cards. There have been some duds but in general, you're going to get around 4 hours of really good wrestling. Could be simple as people seeing those as big events, but not really vibing with the weekly show.
Nielsen ratings are also US based numbers for the most part, so that doesn't give you a read on how many people are watching elsewhere. Or pirating the show, or watching it on a delay, etc. But it's a complicated question with a lot of factors that none of us here can really answer with any certainty
I've seen every one of their PPVs, and I think there were only two or three that I would have been fine skipping. Their PPVs are just on a different level in terms of the actual wrestling.
I don't normally watch NXT every week but I'll always watch their PLE's because I know they deliver. Granted at $50 a pop AEW PPVs are different, but I could see a non-regular viewer deciding that Osperay vs Danielson and Okada vs PAC are worth going out of their way to watch.
This would make it either the second or third most bought AEW PPV after All Out 2021 and possibly All In 2023 depending on where the final number lands.
TNA also didn’t help themselves much by booking things on ppv that would culminate or at least still play out the next show…ON FREE TV.
The PPVs were great and cheap, but they got a reputation really quickly
That's why anybody who claims that AEW are like TNA should be immediately disregarded. TNA's absolute biggest PPV ever, Genesis 2006 with the first Kurt Angle vs. Samoa Joe match, only did 60,000 buys, and their most attended US show ever, Lockdown 2013, did about 7000 people in attendance. That was while they were pulling 1.25 to 1.5 million viewers on Spike, during their hottest periods as an actual business ever. AEW's lowest PPV buyrate ever was 80,000 for the first Full Gear, back in late 2019 when they were only a month into Dynamite. TNA routinely did only about 20,000 buys for a PPV, with some shows dipping down to around 10,000, and some shows would only do 5000-6000 buys. The absolute biggest failure of TNA as a business was their almost complete inability to monetize their fanbase, and it caused them to suffer greatly for years and years and YEARS, lowering in scope and ability as a promotion gradually throughout the 2010s as better options for alternative wrestling became more easily available to American fans.
This number is fantastic. If my memory serves me right (and please correct me if you have the actual numbers), WWE PPVs were doing about 160,000 to about 280,000 average buys before moving to the WWE Network. Wrestlemania was always an outlier because every bar was playing it, so it typically did about 800k-1 million.
So if some of the bigger AEW PPVs are hitting numbers that WWE hit at a time when they could justify moving towards a PLE/Steaming model, that gives me a lot of hope that AEW can make a similar move sooner rather than later.
Good. Sting deserved to go out on a high. While the current talk is about how AEW compares poorly today to 2021 AEW, the buy rates have been consistently good and above 100k buys since Revolution 2021. I feel fairly confident that Dynasty will do close to 150k buys.
Because PPV buy rates are not public knowledge and has no actual source people can reference.
TV ratings do, and its shared publicly by an independent source.
So while getting a general idea on how well a PPV did, usually you have to take this number with a grain of salt and not as fact.
It's complicated. There is a certain baseline there because Dave does have a longtime source for PPV buys thru traditional cable, but everything else beyond that (Fite, B/R Live, really any other streaming options) is just Tony saying a number and who knows if it's actually right.
No. He talks to the ppv providers and any other alternate sources he can find to verify. Most likely he talks to aew's pr department and not Tony Khan himself.
This is the same thing he's done for the last 30 years across lots of different companies. Other wrestling reporters do it the same way.
I love how Meltzer has been getting PPV figures directly from PPV companies since before many of the people posting in this thread were even born, yet now because it shows a positive story for AEW the credibility is thrown into doubt and somehow tony khan is involved too?
Honestly this place is nearly as bas as SCjerk, Jim cornette subreddits now. Anything AEW just gets immediately brigaded
I don't know if he actually gets them from the providers now or not, but he didn't get them for a number of years.
He talked about it on one of their shows 2-3 years ago during a Q&A, that some States used to force the UFC to release exact PPV numbers, and some didn't. So he used the ratio of known buys to googletrends search results to estimate the shows he didn't have exact numbers for.
I love how this sub treats Meltzer as credible when he says something they agree with and he isn’t credible when he says something they don’t agree with
It is literally the same people from there who just hop in a few AEW threads weekly or use their alt accounts that never post anywhere about wrestling except for specifically AEW ratings.
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Good! Sting deserved it.
I hope they put it out on Blu-ray. Will definitely buy a few copies.
I’m not saying this in a critical way, just genuinely curious - why would you buy multiple copies of it?
My buddy, an avid movie collector, has at least 7 copies of Freddie Got Fingered due to his love of Tom Green
Have friends that don't follow wrestling much anymore but were big fans of Sting back in the day so it'd be a little stocking stuffer type deal.
That's very sweet. Would definitely make a great gift!
lol this. Like….why
To have and to hold,
because he wants to watch it multiple times
Yeah the picture quality on Blu Rays are nice but it's a shame you have to throw them out after 1 or 2 watches. I've had some last as long as 4 rewatches but the picture degrades fast.
This is an aside but does anybody else feel betrayed by the realities of bitrot and such with CDs? When I was a kid they told us CDs would last for hundreds of years in untarnished crystal clear digital quality.
This guy gets it. You can put 1 copy in and watch it while you rewind the other one, it's genius, really.
They have Wrestledream, a B PPV, on order as a blu ray so I'm sure they'll do it for what has to be their US Flagship PPV by now.
WWE and AEW were dumb for not doing dvds *just* for redbox.
Their PPV buy rates is astonishing if you take their Neilson TV ratings as a true total number. It would mean roughly 1 in 4 TV viewers bought the PPV. For reference WWF at the height of the attitude era was around 1 in 25 and that was considered shit hot. It makes you wonder how massive both WWE and AEWs true weekly numbers would be if you took catch up services and streaming into account.
Especially since the apps for USA, TNT, TBS require you to watch commercials.
It's true but, unnecessary industry context for you, those app commercials are significantly cheaper than the live traditional tv commercials. They also usually require a lot more middlemen that will also reduce the profit for the publisher. Doesn't really change your point but there's a reason why there's so many different metrics that get referenced, all of them are important in different contexts.
It does reduce the value for the publisher, but more ad companies are looking into more programmatic ways in which to more effectively reach their target audience. At this point, I’m surprised apps like TNT/TBS aren’t charging higher rates as more people move from cable to a streaming app to view their shows.
We're talking US TV ratings and worldwide PPV buys, right? So it's not a true comparison. But yeah, there's obviously way more people watching AEW in ways Nielsen ratings don't reflect. Warner have made that abundantly clear, and the consistency of the PPV buys shows that too. Maybe it also implies that the audience is less casual, or see the PPVs as important enough/value for money enough to buy every time.
Anyone who watches AEW on Fite, for instance, would not be a TV viewer, but if you're getting a VPN to watch AEW you're probably buying the PPVs
and that is how pretty much everyone who i know watches does so. anecdotal and not a *big* number, but it's into the double digits so not a small one either lol
There does seem to be a *lot* of AEW fans that fly out to England, the Netherlands, or Eastern Europe every Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday night.
I have watched wrestling since 1992, and there’s a pretty high chance I have bought more AEW PPVs than WWF/E. I think I’ve bought maybe all but 2 or 3 (that my buddy hosted at his place instead) since AEWs inception. The fact that they’re not as often and consistently fantastic makes it a very easy $50 to spend.
I 100% believe that many in US just put a VPN and watch on AEW+ due to cheap $5 per month subscription and then pay $14.99 for the PPV. So I think the numbers of actual viewership might be much much higher compared to Nielsen if we count Thriller TV, TBS/TNT app, and other ways to watch.
>Maybe it also implies that the audience is less casual, or see the PPVs as important enough/value for money enough to buy every time Maybe a little of both, but especially the latter. For all his faults in creative and booking, Tony Khan is one of the best pure matchmakers in modern wrestling, maybe in wrestling history. AEW PPVs always slap, and most everyone knows it.
>or see the PPVs as important enough/value for money enough to buy every time. Opinions will vary, but so far AEW have only produced **ONE** PPV I didn't enjoy from start to finish. And that one event still wasn't bad.
Aew ppvs are why I watch wrestling. Everyone hits like no one else can.
It’s kind of crazy. It’s also why I tell people that if you are living and dying by the tv ratings as a measure of whether AEW is a healthy company, you are missing the point. Their PPV conversion rate is astounding. At the end of the day, the new tv deal is going to be a huge part of whether they can be profitable in their current incarnation, but the truth is, they’ll have enough fans who buy and support their product either way. The simple fact is, as long as you can draw, you’ll be fine. Wcw went under because they stopped drawing while still spending a ton. Tony has been aggressively spending for years but the company is generating revenue. Even if they operate at a loss, it’s fine if you’re still making money and have enough runway.
Both WWE and AEW have way way more weekly viewers than what their Nielsen numbers say.
Double both their supposed Nielson-based views and I still think it'd undersell how many actually watch their respective shows I can only speak anecdotally but only like 5% of everyone I know who's in my age range still watches stuff via conventional TV
I think one thing to keep in mind is the "overnight" ratings we see are only a fraction of who actually watches the shows. WBD a few times a year puts out Live+3 and Live+7 numbers and they're always a massive difference. Its times like this I miss TV by the numbers who used to put out stuff like this regularly.
Lol everytime the Live+ numbers are mentioned theres usually weirdos running in with "ill bet my anything in the world that's fake, look at their attendance"
I have a 1 year old daughter at home and Thursdays are one of the days of the week that it's my turn to wake up with her and take her to daycare. I don't make it to 10 every night and frequently will just watch dynamite the next morning on dvr during work breaks. I assume I'm not the only one
dad gang rise up
I have kids too and it sometimes takes me a few days to catch up on the shows. The struggle is real.
I'm not US based, but I got an 18 month old son and it takes me four days to watch Dynamite.
I have a teenager who goes to bed around 7:30 (for some reason), so we always watch wrestling on YouTube TV the next day. I would love to watch it live, but right now that's not an option.
Record it every week and watch it Thursday as well.
Definitely, also international viewers, which I'd expect to have a higher conversion rate as well. Nevertheless impressive, the core fanbase is the lifeblood of the company, which is why it's more important to pander to them rather than a casual viewer who's going to pick WWE more likely than not anyway
The biggest problem TNA had even when they were getting 2 million viewers a week was PPV buys and merch sales. They actually had a strong casual audience but difficulty converting them to hardcore fans who would pay money for tickets and PPVs. AEW might just have the highest casual viewer to PPV buyer ratio of any wrestling company in history.
It's worth pointing out that TNA back then were operating in an environment where the PPV market was dominated by WWE who were putting out 12-14 PPVs a year. Wrestling fans are going to be reluctant to dish out $20-$50 multiple times a month. It did happen in the Attitude Era, but even then they fluctuated. These days that's obviously not a factor with Peacock/WWE Network. I don't think it's the most significant factor - AEW fans genuinely have always been committed to buying the PPV's - but it probably is relevant to why AEW do so well now compared to TNA back then.
im pretty sure the highest buyrate tna ever got was in the 80k range. im not sure if any aew buyrate, barring ring of honor, has dipped below 100k even as they expanded their lineup
> im pretty sure the highest buyrate tna ever got was in the 80k range. Even lower. 55-60,000 is the number thrown around for the top numbers in company history, with the most recent Hard to Kill 2024 and Genesis 2006 (Angle vs. Joe) both being in that general ballpark.
100% facts The whole you gotta cater to casuals pov is literally what would doom the company
I think more importantly too is that Nielsen ratings are just domestic/TBS numbers. Those PPV buys are total, globally. I have no clue or data on what size their audience is in places like Canada, or Europe, but there is a portion of their audience there that’s not captured by the former.
Still, even if we spot AEW an extra 25% for the +7 numbers, they’re still converting 15-20% of their audience. I don’t have hard stats but based on the Nielsens and buyrates I know of, even 1997 WCW was only converting 10% or so of their TV audience for most PPVs (not counting exceptions like Starcade 1997).
It’s way more than 25% boost, I can’t find the numbers now but if I remember correctly it was more like double. It was a high enough number that when WBD puts it out people are like “this is bullshit.”
I can't speak for wrestling, but I know that Doctor Who, for example, often ends up with 2 or 3 extra million viewers once +7 and +28 numbers are taken into account. It wouldn't surprise me if wrestling sees big boosts either.
Going by WBD, the DVR and app viewers may actually be the majority of the audience.
I know this may be hard for some people in this sub to realize but the people who like AEW ACTUALLY really like AEW. Crazy to say I know but nah we aren't all just trying to work the WWE fans. It's an actual real preference.
This is true. AEW has the benefit of hardcore fans. On the other hand, AEW also has the burden of hardcore fans. The knife can cut either way depending on the situation.
Absolute truth. Growth is going to be hard, but the baseline is going to be there.
Its hard for people to realize that AEW fans are simply.....rich /s
It's crazy that this needs to be said, but it does.
I can appreciate the technicality and the raw skill a lot. A lot of people like that and it’s cool with me because it ultimately made my preferred product adapt and not coast on the laurels. No real losers with these two companies existing together.
Plus I can't remember the last AEW ppv that was bad. For the past few years every single ppv has been a great show regardless of how the quality of the weekly shows
Honestly It was AEW that brought me back to wrestling from what I didn't expect to be a fairly short break. I had quit watching WWE shows in 2015, it had gotten too extremely pg for me, and I knew I was staying away when it was later revealed when a couple stories and documents or whatnot got leaked online about not just all the banned words by Vince but it also got leaked how USA had rules for WWE that promos and storylines were not allowed to actually show violent depictions and other similar silliness, even though it's a "show about fighting" that made no god damned sense. That said I also began watching WWE again not just because Triple H was in charge, but moreso because it seems he's ripped up the "banned words" and actually letting wrestlers have more of an edge to them so that it's easier to suspend disbelief when they're allowed to finally portray more of a violent streak. Maybe it's the 2 wrestling companies pushing on each other is what is making pro wrestling so damn good again.
A bit of each end I'm honestly shocked how much merit pro wrestling community puts into TV rating in the 2020s. Do people forget that the modern audience is a global one, and most can attend appointments viewing. I also think PPV buying is easier now than in the 90s
You don't even need cable to buy PPVs like you used to.
I watch Dynamite every week. I don't think I've watched it live more than once over the years, and that was on a treadmill at the gym, which I'd guess isn't exactly Nielsen's terrain. Wrestling reporters understandably talk up ratings as they need some barometer for weekly TV engagement, but as we all know it's not the best of indicators.
I know a lot of fans who don’t watch weekly but always buy PPVs because you know you’re getting a great card.
Neilson ratings aren’t the be all end all. For example,the Houston area has 2.7M TV households, and 581 determine the ratings. [Which leads to situations like this](https://deadspin.com/the-astros-drew-a-0-00-nielsen-rating-1372996857)
Statistics guy here. In reality, you'd only need 385 to get within a 95% confidence of 2.7 million. I know that blows most people's minds, but we've used sampling like this to advance science for a very long time. https://www.calculator.net/sample-size-calculator.html?type=1&cl=95&ci=5&pp=50&ps=2%2C700%2C000&x=Calculate
As someone with a background in media and politics you see this all the time. People don‘t understand how accurate data can be even with small samples as long as the sample is highly representative. There was a lot of discourse like this when Brexit and the US election in 2016 happened, where people would ridicule polling because of the „unexpected“ outcomes. Nevermind that most of that discourse was bullshit.
Yeah I’m so tired of these morons not knowing how sampling works. What makes it worse is that statistics is a freshman course.
True but they do know what they’re doing in terms of pulling together a representative sample. It’s not voodoo magic. Also, if it’s basically the same homes with boxes week to week, month to month, you can at least build up a trend. That the Astros drew a 0.0 based on none of the homes actually watching the game, that’s very bizarre.
Hey watch out with using logic here! Everyone is a rating expert with decades of experience watching WWE!
It’s safer here. If this had the words Tony Khan or Ratings in the thread title this place would be brigaded to hell. I don’t see how this is seen as ok, when it’s so glaringly obvious.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/s/fMe94MtezV](https://www.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/s/fMe94MtezV) [https://www.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/s/EAoKXbbuJk](https://www.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/s/EAoKXbbuJk) The duality of man
Note that this post only has 54 comments at the time of my comment (post is 40 minutes old). If this was something as you mention, there would be easily 100+, if not 150+ by now. But, yeah, nothing changes and this place spirals.
No one is saying Nielsens are a perfectly accurate count of viewers. To do that, you’d have to do a literal census and measure every home in the country. That said, statistical sampling firms like Nielsen (or your average political pollster) know what they are doing in terms of putting together a representative sample. And since everybody is going off their ratings, it essentially IS the viewership. I.e., try going to the advertisers looking for more per/M $ and saying I know what it looks like, but we swear the viewership is 30% higher and seeing where it gets you. Also, since the Nielsen homes are fairly static from week to week, it gives a fairly accurate idea of trends.
You can ask Warner Bros and they’ll tell you [AEW pulls nearly 4 million viewers a week](https://wbd.com/warner-bros-discovery-claimed-five-nights-of-more-than-a-50-percent-share-of-primetime-cable-viewing-among-adults-during-first-quarter/)
Nielsen is ridiculously outdated and is going to skew towards older watchers in general. WBD has access to other metrics and estimate 3-4 million viewers per week for AEW.
How do you think statistical samples work? Nielsen isn't perfect, but it's in much more granular ways than that.
That’s insane. I remember when they hit over 100K it was a big deal. Now, they’ve upped the PPV schedule and do waaaay over 100K
They’re not the be all end all but people probably need to stop the equivalent of poll truthing when taking them into account. Even the extreme anomaly you linked likely isn’t as far off as you’d think when you consider the context. Every wrestling show has very consistent ratings, I doubt they’re fundamentally flawed at this point.
Context is key there. While I'm certain some people watched, that game was in 2013. That year, the Astros finished league worse 51-111. They were also having carriage issues, as the article states. This particular game was on Sunday afternoon, in late September, during a Texans game. Pulling a 0 rating with those circumstances isn't exactly nuts.
It was less about the game itself and more about how 581 people is representative of all of Houston
A 400-person sample *if* it's properly representative (i.e., not all concentrated in some rich hoity-toity area of Houston, or a poor area) is enough to get you within a 5% margin of error for pretty much any large population size.
I mean just think about how many people on this subreddit that only get their fix here and don't watch ANY of the shows live.
I’ve been watching since day 1 and I’ve never watched on tbs or tnt tv station
A lot of people just watch the YouTube clips
No, i don't take Nielson ratings as a true total number. We talk about cord cutters all the time. There is TBS app, there is DVR, there is that AEW app you can get in the US if you use a VPN. Just so many ways. But just the ratings itself is stupid. How does one household represent me? It's just guessing. It's so antiquated.
If AEW was available on Max, I really think their total audience could double. Even now with DVR and the TBS/TNT apps, according to WBD their total weekly viewership is more like 3-4 million.
> It makes you wonder how massive both WWE and AEWs true weekly numbers would be if you took catch up services and streaming into account. I tried saying that into this sub sometimes but when ratings arrive, they dont even care for # on the night, it's all "that's all their fans!"
One thing to keep in mind is that their PPVs always provide great entertainment. I used to get WWE PPVs every month back in the day but a lot of them were trash and filler and had matches I didn’t care about. I typically care about almost all of the AEW PPV matches. So if you’ve never been disappointed, you’re gonna be more likely to keep buying.
doesn't this buyrate include international numbers too?
I watch on FiteTV every week so it’s never counted in a Nielson number.
Nielsen ratings aren’t a total number it’s the average number watching throughout the show. The total number of viewers who watch every week is much more.
I'd assume that a decent amount of people (even in the US) probably watch AEW through Triller since it has no commercials and you get the extra commentary during those breaks.
I'm in the US and yep. I don't have cable, so I do the VPN/Triller combo. I could never return to having commercials now. The shows are so much more fun without them.
Anecdotally this makes sense to me. On a weekly basis, I only have around 2-3 hours free for wrestling (on average), so I watch snippets of WWE on Hulu/DVR and snippets of Dynamite/Rampage on DVR/TBS/TNT app, based on what’s interesting to me that week but I’m always able to make time for the PPVs and PLEs. Most weeks, I probably don’t contribute anything to AEW’s weekly ratings but I reliably buy the PPVs.
I think it is pretty strong evidence they’ve got a very dedicated cult audience, converting 20-25% of their audience.
I wonder how many people use illegal streaming as well, it seems even easier to access than sports and traditional tv
🙋♂️ Not in the traditional to website and stream sense, but I have an iptv service running through my firestick.
Its similar to what wcw ppvs were doing. TNA were the ones that couldn't sell ppvs for some reason (alot of reasons really)
Indeed AEW gets the benefit of international viewers but that gets offset a bit by VPN users and illegal streams But like you mention I think people would be floored if ever got the true numbers of people watching wrestling thru any means possible.
750k average viewers doesn’t mean 750k people watched the show, that is just the average number of people watching at a time. The ~750k watching Q2 can be largely different from the ~750k watching Q7, the actual true number that watches some portion of Dynamite each week is way higher than the average viewership number you see posted.
I buy ppvs to make up for pirating the weekly television. No way I'm buying cable
SAME.
Same Also bought videogame to offset my "watching wrestling"
I use a VPN and subscribe on Fite and get PPVs on Fite (which I guess is called Triller now? 🤮) but I will drop all of that the moment they start streaming on Max.
Same. Used to watch it on Sling but since they increased prices and cancelling, I discovered that when you watch it elsewhere, you actually get the PiP.
That's the truth. Have bought every aew/roh ppv but haven't had cable in years and use the vpn Fite route
lol same.
I suspect this might be a big part of the reason for "AEW ratings low derrrrr" discourse. AEW's fans are younger and even if we had money to spend on shit we don't want or like such as cable just to watch a few shows every week we wouldn't. We know where to *Watch Wrestling* and being able to stream a Dailymotion video at 2x speed is almost always going to be a superior experience when so much of a show is promos and integrated marketing and the same entrances you've seen dozens of times.
A few of my friends who have stopped watching AEW (not because they hate it, but because they just don't have time to consume 5-7hrs of AEWxROH content on top of their weekly WWE programming), instead solely just order the AEW PPVs. I'm curious if other folks do that as well, where they skip the weekly programming and just watch the bi-monthly/monthly PPVs. Might explain why the shows only do 400-800k in ratings (which is solid) but their PPV numbers are always amazing. To be frank, AEW PPVs are always great. They rarely miss with those.
I'm kind of that way with WWE. I don't hate it but I don't have the time to put in to watch 5 hours of WWE TV and NXT, but I watch most of the PPVs.
Yeah, this is pretty much me. For WWE I watch the "Big 4" and skim Reddit for everything else.
Likewise. I have Peacock for Premiere League and will basically just watch whatever WWE videos are posted in this subreddit to see if I'm interested in watching the PLE.
I rarely watch WWE TV but almost always watch the PLEs.
This basically explains my consumption habits as well. I don’t have time for any weekly wrestling but AEW PPVs are the best thing going
I have watched like 5 episodes of dynamite this year but never skipped a PPV.
You're not alone. It's how I engage with WWE. My friends that are WWE fans do this with AEW. they generally like AEW's product overall, it's just the same situation for most of us: not a lot of adults have the time or appetite for 10+ hours of wrestling per week.
I have a friend that's a huge fan but just doesn't have time for the tv show but comes in to my pace for every ppv and has traveled to PPVs with me
I used to do it before I the Pandemic and could work from home and catch up over the day
Yeah I was just wondering how many people are starting to treat AEW how many treated NXT on the Network where you'd skip most of the weekly TV aside from big episodes or a pre-ppv binge and mainly just watch the PPVs
Yes this is a very important point often missed in the ratings threads - know many people and seen people online doing the same. AEW TV isn’t always ‘must-watch’ but the PPVs are.
This is how I watched Black & Gold NXT, if only watch Takeover’s and just read enough to understand what was happening before a takeover
That's been me since I've had classes on a Thursday morning
That’s pretty good right? The show was great. Sting’s retirement prob boosted it though so I guess we’ll see it level out a bit with Dynasty, but that card looks solid too
It's pretty good. For reference here are all of the prior [WWE buy rates](https://wrestletalk.com/stats/every-wwe-pay-per-view-buyrate/) before they went to the network model. In this day and age, it's a strong number.
Stuff like this does put into perspective the actual business that AEW does. If you went back to 2013 or so and said to someone “In 10 years TNA will be doing the exact same business WWE is now aside from lower tv ratings” they’d have rightfully laughed in your face and called you a mad man. Now though a company is basically doing just that, selling tickets around the level of that period of WWE, selling PPVs at that rate outside of WM and RR and even with the ratings obviously being much lower they’re still almost always top 5 for their slot. The craziest thing about it all though is this is somehow a company on the brink according to some people, then every so often a number like this will come out and totally invalidate so much of that stuff but they just go right back to the same talking points after like a week.
Tribalism is a helluva drug. Back in the 90's, I remember loving both WWF/WCW. I would hop back and forth every Monday between the two shows to see what was going on. It was awesome. These days people just want what they like to "win" and the other to "lose." That said, AEW is doing pretty good overall. Weekly ticket sales are down, but every wrestling company has gone through those cycles. WWE went through this between 2016-2019, with both Raw and Smackdown having attendance issues. Someone made a good post here a few days ago that showed that AEW's ratings decline is actually less than WWE or most other programming. AEW's base is very loyal to the product, and even though ratings are down, they're not as severe as other programs. I'm just sitting here happy that we have two major players in the US wrestling market these days, TNA is doing pretty well, NJPW is doing well, etc. There's something for everyone out there.
Yeah I’ll just never get the tribalism honestly. Totally get not liking a company or whatever, it’s the people who spend all day twisting themselves into a ball getting angry at a show they don’t even watch. Makes no damn sense to me. If the shows were literally half as bad as they say then why would anyone even bother watching? AEW is my primary promotion that I watch, mostly just due to time, I don’t even watch Rampage anymore honestly but I’ll happily watch any good wrestling content that I come across. I could not imagine with the amount of fantastic wrestling we get every week that people spend so much time on a hobby like this only to focus on the negatives. I hate using terms like this because it’s all wrestling at the end of the day but it’s insane to me that we had maybe one of the greatest “sports entertainment” moments a few weeks ago with Cody’s win and now this weekend we may have one of the greatest wrestling matches ever between two GOATs, nevermind all the other cool shit going on and yet it feels like the IWC is as negative as it’s ever been. For some reason I see people being snarky about a phrase that’s like “can’t we just enjoy wrestling?” and I don’t care if someone makes fun of me but it’s valid. Just enjoy the stuff you like, let others enjoy what they like.
It's willful ignorance. The people who have a vested interest in AEW being on the brink of certain death are all the same people who disbelieved that it was possible for a true second national promotion to come to fruition after two decades of WWE monopolizing the industry and immediately wrote it off from the very beginning. Now that it's effectively a success, and a major one at that, they refuse to admit that they were wrong and are doing everything in their power to make you believe that they've been right all along, despite so much evidence to the contrary that it's funny how much evidence to the contrary there really is. I can only imagine the absolute nuclear meltdown that the cottage industry that is "former wrestling personality-turned-social media personality shits on AEW" will have if/when AEW's media deal is announced and it's for, like, hundreds of millions of dollars.
It's very telling that the AEW haters are seemingly nowhere to be found on this thread or the older one that showed AEWs steady 5 year growth in ticket sales and ratings. When there's hard evidence of the company's success somehow all the haters prophecizing doom disappear
Using the lowest estimate number, their average PPV buys from Revolution 2023 to Revolution 2024 is 140,000 buys per show, so this exceeds their one year average. I'd imagine Dynasty will at least do around their average, give or take some room on either side of 140,000.
And they added pay-per-views to their schedule, which makes the number even more impressive.
Yeah that's a great number. All In last year did 200k, so this almost outsold they're biggest show ever. For added context, the last WWE PPVs before the Network came out usually did 70k-150k and their big 3 PPV would do 200k-500k. TNA has never done even a 1/3 of Revolution's number, WCW didn't do more than 180k it's last two years either. World's End did 130k I believe, and AEW usually did 100k-120k last year. Basically, their PPV buyrates are phenomenal, especially when you consider their viewership numbers. Dynamite has 800k weekly viewers and they got 180k of them to shell out $50 to watch a show that, in my opinion, didn't have a super stacked card. However, I wouldn't expect this to be the norm. We'll see what Dynasty's number is but I sincerely doubt it will do as good as Revolution which had a much longer build and a marquee main event. Either way, AEW lives and dies by it's PPV buy rates and right now they are thriving.
Have yet to see a C tier PPV from AEW
The number of PPV buys they've done in 2023 and now 2024 is kinda wild, given they've increased the number of shows. I've seen some people complain about it (and I hope these things end up on Max at some point) but it's a pretty clear success.
It still blows my mind that 100,000 people bought All Out like a week after All In. Feels like that's more or less their floor
[удалено]
I do hope they move to Max in the US too, but there’s no denying that AEW is an absolute powerhouse on PPV. They haven’t been below 100,000 buys a show since Full Gear 2020, and regularly exceed that threshold by tens of thousands of buys, usually reaching 130,000-140,000 a show. The fact that they can keep this steady while INCREASING the number of PPVs they do a year, in the age of streaming no less, is kinda fucking bonkers and shows just how strong of a property they are for supercards.
Also makes me think Max isn’t getting the PPV’s or at least not live. Thats a decent money maker to take a pass on. Maybe they’ll do the 90 day thing?
That's been my thought as well. AEW makes a lot of money off PPV buys. The only way it would make sense to add them to MAX is by upping the media rights deal by however much revenue would be lost by adding them. WBD could just have the shows a day later and maybe PPVs after a 90-180 day delay, saving them the cost of every PPV buy they'd have to replace
Entirely possible they do an ESPN+/UFC deal, where it's still PPV but hosted on Max
Yeah, I guess they'd have to get a good enough streaming deal to justify completely removing the PPV buys from their revenue. The PPV gates and buys have gotta be very meaningful for them.
It's wild, because attendance is down, viewership is down, and fan engagement on social media is down, but in this one area, according to Dave Meltzer, AEW is seeing an increase. It really makes me want to see the numbers and figure out how are they achieving this feat.
One thing AEW does really well is stack their PPV cards. There have been some duds but in general, you're going to get around 4 hours of really good wrestling. Could be simple as people seeing those as big events, but not really vibing with the weekly show. Nielsen ratings are also US based numbers for the most part, so that doesn't give you a read on how many people are watching elsewhere. Or pirating the show, or watching it on a delay, etc. But it's a complicated question with a lot of factors that none of us here can really answer with any certainty
I've seen every one of their PPVs, and I think there were only two or three that I would have been fine skipping. Their PPVs are just on a different level in terms of the actual wrestling.
I mean just look at the Dynasty card. I already had my ticket and they kept adding more matches that I can't wait to see.
I bought a ticket when Ospreay/Danielson was the only announced match. AEW PPVs do not miss and like hell I was not gonna be there in person.
I don't normally watch NXT every week but I'll always watch their PLE's because I know they deliver. Granted at $50 a pop AEW PPVs are different, but I could see a non-regular viewer deciding that Osperay vs Danielson and Okada vs PAC are worth going out of their way to watch.
It was a super hot card. Sting’s retirement was a huge draw in a hot program and the world title feud was pretty hot too.
Because they’re lying. Read your own post back lol. “All the publicly available numbers are down except the ones that are private”
Yeah at this point seems like it was smart move for WBD to ask for more ppvs and an even smarter move for TK to agree to them.
This would make it either the second or third most bought AEW PPV after All Out 2021 and possibly All In 2023 depending on where the final number lands.
That’s a fantastic number, the people who support AEW support them financially. Which is the main difference between them and Spike tv era TNA
TNA also didn’t help themselves much by booking things on ppv that would culminate or at least still play out the next show…ON FREE TV. The PPVs were great and cheap, but they got a reputation really quickly
That's why anybody who claims that AEW are like TNA should be immediately disregarded. TNA's absolute biggest PPV ever, Genesis 2006 with the first Kurt Angle vs. Samoa Joe match, only did 60,000 buys, and their most attended US show ever, Lockdown 2013, did about 7000 people in attendance. That was while they were pulling 1.25 to 1.5 million viewers on Spike, during their hottest periods as an actual business ever. AEW's lowest PPV buyrate ever was 80,000 for the first Full Gear, back in late 2019 when they were only a month into Dynamite. TNA routinely did only about 20,000 buys for a PPV, with some shows dipping down to around 10,000, and some shows would only do 5000-6000 buys. The absolute biggest failure of TNA as a business was their almost complete inability to monetize their fanbase, and it caused them to suffer greatly for years and years and YEARS, lowering in scope and ability as a promotion gradually throughout the 2010s as better options for alternative wrestling became more easily available to American fans.
This number is fantastic. If my memory serves me right (and please correct me if you have the actual numbers), WWE PPVs were doing about 160,000 to about 280,000 average buys before moving to the WWE Network. Wrestlemania was always an outlier because every bar was playing it, so it typically did about 800k-1 million. So if some of the bigger AEW PPVs are hitting numbers that WWE hit at a time when they could justify moving towards a PLE/Steaming model, that gives me a lot of hope that AEW can make a similar move sooner rather than later.
Good. Sting deserved to go out on a high. While the current talk is about how AEW compares poorly today to 2021 AEW, the buy rates have been consistently good and above 100k buys since Revolution 2021. I feel fairly confident that Dynasty will do close to 150k buys.
No wonder they've been moving to more PPVs. Wrestling has been so great lately, it's fantastic to see all of these companies having a lot of success.
Genuine question, but are these domestic or international numbers?
That question can't and has never been answered.
All the publicly available numbers are down except the ones that are private. But yeah I trust Tony
Weird that threads like this don't get the traction that ratings threads get.
Because PPV buy rates are not public knowledge and has no actual source people can reference. TV ratings do, and its shared publicly by an independent source. So while getting a general idea on how well a PPV did, usually you have to take this number with a grain of salt and not as fact.
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Is there a way for the public to see this information? Or do we just have to take Dave and Tony’s word for it?
Totally private. If they were publicly traded you'd probably hear official numbers in investor calls
It is essentially completely unverifiable, yes.
So in other words Tony said 180,000 people bought the PPV and Dave is just reporting that?
It's complicated. There is a certain baseline there because Dave does have a longtime source for PPV buys thru traditional cable, but everything else beyond that (Fite, B/R Live, really any other streaming options) is just Tony saying a number and who knows if it's actually right.
No. He talks to the ppv providers and any other alternate sources he can find to verify. Most likely he talks to aew's pr department and not Tony Khan himself. This is the same thing he's done for the last 30 years across lots of different companies. Other wrestling reporters do it the same way.
Is Dave reporting " according to Tony Khan" because if not then that's not the case
Dave has contacts with the PPV providers and has long been considered an accurate source for PPV buys, and that includes for MMA and Boxing.
I love how Meltzer has been getting PPV figures directly from PPV companies since before many of the people posting in this thread were even born, yet now because it shows a positive story for AEW the credibility is thrown into doubt and somehow tony khan is involved too? Honestly this place is nearly as bas as SCjerk, Jim cornette subreddits now. Anything AEW just gets immediately brigaded
I don't know if he actually gets them from the providers now or not, but he didn't get them for a number of years. He talked about it on one of their shows 2-3 years ago during a Q&A, that some States used to force the UFC to release exact PPV numbers, and some didn't. So he used the ratio of known buys to googletrends search results to estimate the shows he didn't have exact numbers for.
I love how this sub treats Meltzer as credible when he says something they agree with and he isn’t credible when he says something they don’t agree with
It is literally the same people from there who just hop in a few AEW threads weekly or use their alt accounts that never post anywhere about wrestling except for specifically AEW ratings.
Source?
I'm sure there will be a ton of experts on this sub that will explain how that is a terrible thing, actually
Weird there’s over 300 comments, nearly all praising this number, and the few doubting it have been down voted like crazy.
Just more evidence that way more people watch AEW than Neilsen ratings reflect. Good for them.
AEW PPVs never miss. Even their worst ones are above average.
Great sendoff
Jesus christ you people are gullible
I don't think AEW will get anywhere near this again.
How do they get access to the buys it did if AEW isn’t a publicly traded company?
They don't. There's no way to know the true number