MLW’s COO Mister Saint Laurent (MSL) was a recent guest on the Pro Wrestling Boom with Jason Powell podcast. MSL would share various details on the ongoings of MLW, including when they might return to pay-per-view. He said,
“I don’t think there are any specific plans in that area. We’re always looking at it and we try to be the value brand whenever we can. Fatu and Hammerstone, originally would have made sense as a pay-per-view, but we got an offer to put it on VICE and certainly, if the economics make sense to keep a match off pay-per-view, you always prefer to, if you can. It’s not always possible. Kudos to VICE for stepping up and putting up what needed to be put up to make that match happen. Otherwise, it probably would have been on pay-per-view. Some of that stuff is tough to answer, you always want to avoid pay-per-view if you can. I’m not anti-pay-per-view, but if you can make the economics work to not have to resort to pay-per-view, you always try. So far, we’ve been able to keep most of our big matches off pay-per-view. That’s not always going to be the case. Is there a pay-per-view this year? If we can get someone to put up the money to not have a pay-per-view, that’s the goal.”
MSL would also talk about MLW’s relationship with VICE, both confirming the pair have ongoing plans. As well as commenting on the ratings of MLW’s Fightland show:
“There’s some stuff being developed for them [VICE] right now.
“A lot of times when numbers go out publicly, and it’s not the company itself putting them out, a lot of times they go out with a negative spin, where we’ve had…it will still be addressed in court at some point. Any time you’re an up-and-coming company with something big going on, people want to tear you down. If the average episode on YouTube does 100,000 viewers, and everyone can watch YouTube, and VICE is in a much smaller portion of homes, not everyone gets the channel, you would hope some people would subscribe to get it. For the first airing, I think that would be about what you’d expect. The number is a little misleading because not only do you have repeat airings, but to this day, on my cable box, you can go watch that match on VICE on Demand and their website as well. The metrics you look at are not necessarily ‘who watched it on the first airing at 10 or 11 on a weeknight?’ That’s not an accurate snapshot of how many people saw that match. A big match for us does 100,000 viewers or 200,000. Battle Riot is almost at a half a million. it’s not always the first airing that gets you the majority of viewers.”
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h/t Fightful
