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| Vince McMahon's last attempt at spiking ratings Photo Credit: WWE.com |
So, Vince McMahon is making an appearance on RAW tonight, allegedly because last week's rating was so bad that he wants to spike it. The dirtsheets are going bonkers. Fans are panicking or engaging in schadenfreude, depending on how they view WWE. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, but reporting on ratings is one of my least favorite things out there. Why? Because people don't know what they mean, and by people, I mean just about everyone who deals with them.
If the reports are true that WWE reacts to bad ratings like this, they don't know what they mean anymore or really how to organically increase them. The reporters don't know how to analyze the ratings. The fans don't know how to react to them. This is a massive reiteration, but I almost feel like it needs to be written again, especially in light of this news.
First off, fans who overreact to ratings are the worst because they miss the point of what wrestling is all about. They end up getting into a habit of reacting to segments in how they'll draw an audience rather in how they enjoyed them. I mean, I am making kind of a generalization here, but it's something that I see a bit too often, and it's frustrating, especially when getting down to the meaning of what ratings fluctuations mean. The implication is that if ratings get too low, USA will pull the plug on RAW, and bye bye wrestling. The truth is that the ratings would have to be in the tank to the point where WWE's viewership would go from 4 million on average to, I don't know, less than 750K? That would be dramatic to say the least. Then again, panicking over ratings wouldn't be nearly as prevalent if the reporters didn't place such importance on them.
Reporting the ratings wouldn't be bad if a lot of these sites didn't engender the kind of thinking that people should enjoy a segment only if it would be highly-rated or make the analysis that short-term booking had anything to do with ratings fluctuations. WWE might have good segments and bad segments, but overall, it's a wash within the bigger picture. People will put WWE in their rotation or their DVR or whatever if they like what's going on overall. If a bad segment chases them away, it's because it's the final straw. Implying that WWE can do anything to change their ratings patterns drastically with better segment-to-segment booking is foolish.
Then again, why does WWE seem to react to bad ratings with tired old tropes and rehashes? I don't want to give a whole lot of credence to reports from nebulous "unnamed sources," but where there's smoke, there's fire. Therefore, it's worth asking why WWE reacts to week-to-week fluctuations with drastic measures. There's a distinct pattern of Vince McMahon appearing when ratings drop. Thankfully, most of the reactions don't involve pulling the plug on wrestlers' pushes, but these angles involving authority figures are all-encompassing that they affect the show.
So, if these week-to-week hot shots don't move ratings, then what does? It's not one appearance here or one match there. It's a shift in direction. McMahon should know this by know because he's seen it twice in his life. Sure, the first time, ratings weren't the metric. However, he didn't revolutionize the industry by throwing out another clean-cut babyface with a muted personality to tour the Northeast corridor. He didn't beat Nitro by continuing to shovel out gimmick after gimmick. He changed the game up. He did something different.
If WWE wants to improve ratings, no, scratch that. Ratings are irrelevant now unless the baseline audience for WWE RAW is something like a quarter million households. If WWE wants to improve business, they need to change the game. In the absence of a gamebreaker (which they probably have or at least had in CM Punk), then the answer would be maybe to tell longer term stories in the interim, to have a solid, longterm direction instead of short, booking for the week strategies.
Again, we'd all be better off if we didn't concern ourselves with the ratings. Whether it's someone as high up as McMahon or as piddling as you or me, they're not worth the aggravation, even if it's the worst rating in 15 years.
