Post by Baker on Dec 10, 2019 2:59:33 GMT
I went digging through buyrates the other day in an attempt to replicate my Ratings Thread pwcom.proboards.com/thread/823/highest-rated-smackdown-nitro-episodes
But conked out before I got to the list making.
It was too much work sifting through decades of WWE Buyrates www.2xzone.com/wwe/buyrates.shtml#.Xe8FnehKjIU
Plus even the most comprehensive sources were incomplete. Then you throw in international buys sometime around 2005 and the whole thing just became too complicated.
I also got lazy and conked out halfway through compiling a best/worst NWA/WCW buyrate list indeedwrestling.blogspot.com/2014/02/deciphering-wcw-buyrates.html
But I did get one big takeaway from the WCW list- Much like the ratings thread, I hadn't realized how bad things got towards the end. I had always assumed WCW was just drawing poorly in comparison to their hot stretch a few years earlier. Wrong! They had a long stretch of historically low buys in 2000-01. Even the vast majority of pre-Hogan pay per views were outdrawing those from WCW's last year.
ECW oswreview.com/history/ecwppv/
Big takeaway here is how steady ECW pay per views buys were. For one year they were consistently at 70-75,000 buys. TV only gave them a slight boost of 5-10,000 per show. Strangely, according to this one source, their most bought PPV came one month before the TNN deal. Iirc their early pay per views weren't available on every PPV outlet, which explains why those numbers are lower. That's my working theory anyway. It's also worth noting a few of their early 2000 PPVs outdrew WCW's monthly PPV offerings.
And poor TNA oswreview.com/history/tna-ppv-statistics-2004-2010/
They peaked at 60,000 for the first Angle/Joe match. By comparison, only the very early (and possibly late?) ECW pay per views drew fewer buys, while only a handful of PPVs in WCW history were bought by less than 60k fans.
*Might still come back at some point to do a best/worst list of all the major companies. If not, the information is right there in the links for anybody who is interested.
But conked out before I got to the list making.
It was too much work sifting through decades of WWE Buyrates www.2xzone.com/wwe/buyrates.shtml#.Xe8FnehKjIU
Plus even the most comprehensive sources were incomplete. Then you throw in international buys sometime around 2005 and the whole thing just became too complicated.
I also got lazy and conked out halfway through compiling a best/worst NWA/WCW buyrate list indeedwrestling.blogspot.com/2014/02/deciphering-wcw-buyrates.html
But I did get one big takeaway from the WCW list- Much like the ratings thread, I hadn't realized how bad things got towards the end. I had always assumed WCW was just drawing poorly in comparison to their hot stretch a few years earlier. Wrong! They had a long stretch of historically low buys in 2000-01. Even the vast majority of pre-Hogan pay per views were outdrawing those from WCW's last year.
ECW oswreview.com/history/ecwppv/
Big takeaway here is how steady ECW pay per views buys were. For one year they were consistently at 70-75,000 buys. TV only gave them a slight boost of 5-10,000 per show. Strangely, according to this one source, their most bought PPV came one month before the TNN deal. Iirc their early pay per views weren't available on every PPV outlet, which explains why those numbers are lower. That's my working theory anyway. It's also worth noting a few of their early 2000 PPVs outdrew WCW's monthly PPV offerings.
And poor TNA oswreview.com/history/tna-ppv-statistics-2004-2010/
They peaked at 60,000 for the first Angle/Joe match. By comparison, only the very early (and possibly late?) ECW pay per views drew fewer buys, while only a handful of PPVs in WCW history were bought by less than 60k fans.
*Might still come back at some point to do a best/worst list of all the major companies. If not, the information is right there in the links for anybody who is interested.