JWeinCom said:
I'm not super familiar with Fightful Select. But if their report is accurate, and TBS is happy, and Tony Khan is happy, and the fans who watch AEW are happy, and wrestlers have another place to make money, then who am I to complain. AEW viewers are already veering off the beaten path, so they're more likely to be plugged into the rest of the wrestling world outside WWE. A lot of those viewers have been there since the beginning, and presumably are fans in large part because of wrestlers they know from the indies. AEW was initially formed after a kind of crowdfunded indie supershow and they regularly mention and feature stars from other promotions. There seems to be somewhat of an expectation that AEW viewers will be familiar with people like Jay White or Minoru Suzuki or El Hijo de Vikingo, so they may have kind of cultivated the kind of fanbase who would be up on that sort of thing. So it's likely they are more likely to watch other promotions compared to WWE only viewers. I just don't think that by and large WWE fans are completely unwilling to watch another promotion. I think for the most part they're just content with what they have. For my part, WWE is putting on something stupid like 10 hours of content a week. I watch 3 or 4 hours a week and am generally satisfied with that. I tried to watch the NXT PLE last week, but honestly it was just kind of too much, not because it was bad, but because I have no connection to what's going on and know that I'm not going to ever really put in the time to keep up with NXT in addition to Raw or Smackdown (although the Dragonov/Hayes match was excellent and maybe I'd be watching NXT this week if Dragonov had won). I'd like to, but there are only so many hours in the day, and so many games to play, books to read, shows to watch, etc etc. Oh and like, work and friends and family and that junk. I kind of think I'm sort of the ideal target for AEW. Not me in particular necessarily, but someone like me who is into wrestling enough to keep up with news sites and such, but kind of on the fence about putting more time into it or replacing some of what I'm already watching. To get a person like that interested though, the product has to kind of be exceptional. Because two more hours of wrestling a week means they're going to have to give up some of the WWE stuff they're watching, or two+ hours of some other hobby, and that's asking a lot. I think that's maybe a longwinded way of saying I partially agree with you? The people who already are watching AEW are probably the lower hanging fruit of the WWE fanbase, those who simply have a bigger appetite for wrestling, or those who weren't satisfied with the WWE product. The rest of the fanbase will probably be harder to sway. But I just don't think it's impossible, or that they are categorically opposed to watching other wrestling. They just need convincing and that hasn't happened yet. |
Fair enough. I just remember trying to convince two of my friends in high school to watch ECW, and they refused because they saw WWE (or WWF at the time) as the only truly good wrestling around. They even made the bingo hall jokes ECW was always getting back then. That mentality still exists for some people today as I have come across it with WWE fans who refuse to even try anything else. I guess these are the harder to sway fans, but I still feel some are impossible to sway no matter what. But again, you made fair points and I get your perspective.
