During the latest edition of his “83 Weeks” podcast, Eric Bischoff commented on the AEW vs. NXT TV ratings, and lots more. You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On some people online claiming that TV ratings aren’t that important anymore: “I keep hearing people say ratings don’t matter, I’ve never heard anyone from a network say that ratings don’t matter, but I keep hearing people in the wrestling business kind of dismissing the significance of ratings. I guess that’s easy to say if you’re not running a TV network and you’re not responsible to your shareholders of that network in terms of keeping it profitable and doing the best you can with that property. But whatever, at the end of the day, people are living and dying, whether they admit it or not, or reacting to at the very least, week-to-week ratings. They’re an indicator, they tell you where your business is going. You can look at your TV ratings and that will tell you, pretty much, what your PPV numbers will look like. You can look at your TV ratings and that’ll tell you, for the most part, you can extrapolate, what your live event business is gonna start to look like. TV ratings mean a lot more than people are admitting, either to themselves or publicly.”
On how the 18-49 demo rating is the target, not total viewership: “The 18-49 year old demo has always been the target. It’s not like this is a new piece of business. It isn’t all of a sudden why have wrestling fans latched on to the fact that, well, ‘It doesn’t matter what the ratings are, it really matters what that key demo is,’ you don’t know what you’re talking about. Yes, 18-49 is the target. It most certainly is. By the way, it’s a broad ass target. It is the target and it always has been the target. This isn’t news.”
On if AEW should panic over their loss to NXT in the ratings last week: “I wouldn’t panic if I was AEW. No, one week, even though it was a pretty big gap this time, I wouldn’t sweat that. I’d pay attention to it. If NXT or AEW’s numbers continue the trajectory that they’re on, this will be a war of attrition. This won’t be a war that is building things bigger like the Monday Night Wars did, this is just a war between AEW and the WWE C show that’s going to be determined by who can outlast the other until they start building an audience, because based on what I’ve seen, neither of them are building an audience. They’re, to one degree or another, they’re both losing an audience.”
(h/t – 411 Wrestling)
