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| If your first thought is about how many buys this is going to get, you're doing it wrong Photo Credit: WWE.com |
No, talking about "the buyrate" sucks because it's really boring and really has no bearing on how we're enjoying things in the moment. For example, look at Extreme Rules. Brock Lesnar vs. John Cena is a watershed match that is truly as symmetrical as it is historic. The last time the two met on the pay-only stage was at the post-WrestleMania event in 2003, making this a match almost a decade in the making. There are so many different threads and angles that this match could take. Yet there are some people on the web bickering about whether it'll do a good buyrate. Seriously? That's haggling over dollars and cents a solid month or two before any numbers are going to be available. No, scratch that, it's haggling over dollars and cents a solid week before the event even happened.
I've pretty much wondered aloud that wrestling has probably hit a baseline audience, that the people watching week in and week out are the ones who are going to watch no matter what happens within a standard deviation or two. I think it's also pretty clear that with the sheer number of options out there for viewing on cable and what have you, the audience for wrestling is no longer as cattle-chuted as it was in 1998, when there were 70 channels tops, as opposed to today where there are 5 times as many options on TV alone, not even counting podcasts, DVDs, On Demand, streaming and web shows. And, as K. Sawyer Paul has pointed out repeatedly, while pirating doesn't make the companies that it hurts financially money, it certainly helps its exposure and cultural relevancy. It might seem like a small win in the short term, but overall, the people who end up remembering it will end up growing its legend. That's all besides the point anyway.
The real point is, what is more interesting to talk about, things like the actual match (which should be good), the way Lesnar's character has been since coming back, Cena's role in the company and short and long term story implications of the Cena/Lesnar match, especially given that the build to date has been pretty good, or arguing over whether Lesnar's presence adding 10,000 viewers or not from last year's Extreme Rules is good enough to justify his return or not. Honestly, the former for me is by far because of how many different things there are to talk about and how divergent each path could and should go. The latter is basically arguing how many baptisms or spring barbecues are happening that day and whether people are able to be home in time to order. I'm not sure about you, but that kind of speculation has very little meat on its bone.
As wrestling fans who have given ourselves the mantel of "smart", we should be looking to raise the discourse and actually discuss wrestling intelligently. This doesn't mean predicting monetary trends or trying to haggle over how a bunch of fickle businessmen in an affluent suburb of New York City are going to react to said monetary trends. It means breaking down stories, thinking critically about what is being said, presented and wrestled and treating wrestling as an art, not as a meat market.
So yeah, if you don't mind, I'd rather the word "buyrate" is never mentioned again among fans who don't stand to make money out of what any wrestling company does outside of extreme circumstances. I've written it before, and I'll probably write about it again, but it's just so frustrating when something that happens on the screen is not judged by how much someone is enjoying it or how "good" it is, but by how much money they're thinking it'll make.
