No_Name_Needed said:
JWeinCom said:
Nothing either company is doing is that out of the ordinary. AEW pretty regularly features title matches on Dynamite since they don't do PPVs as often (Mox vs Punk was sort of done on Dynamite, Bryan vs Moxley, and Hangman vs Bryan at least once), and NXT has main roster guys pretty regularly, and the biggest star I think so far announced is Rhea.
I mean, I'm sure both companies want to convince viewers on the fence to choose their product, but it's not as if either company is going all out. It's all in good fun if someone wants to gloat if "their" side wins (I'd expect that to be Dynamite since it generally outperformed NXT by enough that I don't think the time slot will change things), but it doesn't really tell us anything about the overall state of things.
In general, I don't think comparing the numbers between the two companies is all that useful. With AEW being new, it shouldn't be expected to be putting up the same numbers as WWE, and I think Tony does his company a disservice by trying to play up the competition. I think at this point the more important figures for NXT which is being relaunched after tanking in the ratings as NXT 2.0 and Dynamite which is still newish is the week over week/month over month/year over year changes for their own shows. |
Well I definitely agree that comparing numbers between the two companies is not that useful. I mean one company has been around for decades and has a very loyal fan base, while the other is only three years old and arguably still trying to built it's audience. Sadly, tribalism comes before logical thinking for many people. |
While the Monday night wars were fun, nothing like that will happen ever again. In the 90s, it was really hard to follow both, because if your TV was on Raw, you weren't watching Nitro, unless you maybe had a second TV and were taping it. So it kind of was a zero sum game, especially because it would have cost about 1200 a year to watch all the PPVs for both. Now, channel flipping isn't even a concept anymore. With DVRs and streaming and the WWE PPVs being less than a meal at McDonalds, there's no real reason to choose. If I regularly watched Dynamite and NXT, I'd catch them both this week no problem.
There's only so much wrestling a person can watch in a week, and each company wants more merchandise and engagement, so there's a some competition in that sense, but it's not even close to the existential struggle of the Monday night wars.
