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| The reason for the season |
Festivus is here again, and before we set the pole in the living room and engage in the HOSS FIGHT CAVALCADE known as the Feats of Strength, I got a beef with you people. Yes, YOU PEOPLE. Well, not all of YOU PEOPLE, but there's still enough of you who still fixate on ratings. In 2012. Long after the time when ratings were an important metric for anything wrestling-related.
Yes, it's true that WWE probably gets the bulk of its operating revenue from advertising on RAW. Those dollar figures are probably tied to ratings. It's true. But has anyone stopped to think about context? Really? The answer is no one, because people, in 2012, are freaking out over the average ratings going from 3.0 to 2.5. You know who's not freaking out? USA Network, that's who. They're the ones who were so happy with the show that they asked WWE to expand from two to three hours permanently. They also, if you believe the same sites that report on ratings and parse them like they're LIFE AND FUCKING DEATH, are happy with the returns after that move, even if the ratings decrease has coincided with the expansion in timeslot.
So, if the guys controlling the timeslot are happy with WWE's numbers, why can't you? Why does it matter if the show is pulling the same numbers it was even one year ago, let alone fifteen? What stake do you fucking have in the company that you need to play fiscal analyst? The answer, you don't.
And don't give me the straw man argument of "BUTT IF TEH RATINGZ R BAD, THEY WONT PUSH TEH GUYZ WE LIEKS!" Here's a newsflash, n00bs. The ratings have either been the same or slightly down for the last 400 days, and CM Punk has remained WWE Champion. Daniel Bryan has gotten the biggest fucking push of his life. Damien Sandow, Antonio Cesaro, Sin Cara, and Cody Rhodes have all gotten significant airtime despite the fact that they're all part of this imaginary problem. They've increased the time of wrestling on the show. That's what we all want, right?
Oh, that's right, there are a bunch of you out there who fucking hate seeing good wrestling matches on TV for free (or more accurately, for the price of your cable bill). How many of you fuckers are actually paying money for every PPV nowadays? If you're stealing them via streaming or if you're not watching at all, then what the fuck difference is it to you? And again, who died and made you WWE's fiscal analyst?
I get that there's a time and a place for talking about these sort of things. It would be one thing if it were one part of the discourse, but the way the people I'm aiming this post at talk about it, it dominates discussion. And it sucks. Wrestling is such a varied tapestry of topics interwoven together that it should provide several threads for discussion. To focus on the most boring part not only gives us so-called "Internet" wrestling fans a bad name, but it makes me ashamed to admit that I write about wrestling sometimes, when the most prominent people writing about it like everyone who writes a pay-for "newsletter" focuses in on the mundane.
So yeah, if we make a concerted effort not to focus in on ratings and buyrates and all this other fiscal bullshit like it's the main event in 2013, the world will be a far better place. Well, at least the corner of the wrestling world that focuses on analysis and writing.
