WWE TV personality Paul Heyman was a recent guest on the Casio’s Cut podcast, hosted by comedian Matt Mitchell. During the interview, Heyman said that if social media were a thing in the 90s and ECW hadn’t adapted, they would have went out of business much faster.
“We would have exploited that, like every other opportunity and every other platform that we had, I can’t tell you that it would have hurt ECW because if it would hurt ECW, then I wouldn’t be doing my job understanding the parameters and the opportunities that are presented by any platform or any or any concept of distribution that was happening at the time, then again, you know, would it have helped, one would only hope. People who sit there and they say, ‘Well, this ruined this industry.’ It means you couldn’t keep up. You know, Blackberry couldn’t keep up with smartphones, so BlackBerry went away. Vinyl records — though vinyl is making some sort of a comeback now, it’s really more of a novelty. Vinyl Records couldn’t keep up with CDs, CDs couldn’t come up with streaming network television, television can’t keep up with Netflix. So either you adapt to the distribution platforms that surround you, or you become obsolete. So would social media have helped ECW? It better have, because that would be the obligation and the onus would have been on us, or we would have gone out of business faster than we did anyway.”
H/T to Fightful for the transcription.