Impact Wrestling viewership down for third straight week

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Impact Wrestling viewership down for third straight week

Post by Big Red Machine » May 6th, '18, 01:52

Source: www.F4WOnline.com

By Joseph Currier | @josephcurrier | May 5, 2018 1:38 pm

Impact Wrestling viewership was down for the third straight week on Thursday night.

Thursday's Impact averaged 299,000 viewers on Pop TV, a slight decline from last week's 308,000. Impact again went against the NBA and NHL playoffs, but the previous Thursday also had competition from the first night of the NFL draft.

The rating in the 18-49 demo was steady at 0.07.

The episode featured a lucha libre rules six-man tag match between DJ Z, Andrew Everett & Dezmond Xavier and Drago, Aerostar & El Hijo Del Fantasma, Matt Sydal successfully defending his X Division title against Taiji Ishimori, and a Su Yung vs. Rosemary main event that never got started as a brawl broke out and Rosemary was put into a casket. Next week's show has Pentagon Jr. defending the Impact World Championship against Eli Drake.

During this same week last year, Impact averaged 260,000 viewers.

Here's a look at Impact viewership since March 29th, which was the show's highest number since the Hardys' Final Deletion from July 2016:

March 29th --- 399,000
April 5th -- 294,000 (competition from a WWE special on the greatest moments in WrestleMania history)
April 12th -- 381,000
April 19th -- 373,000
April 26th -- 308,000
May 3rd -- 299,000
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Re: Impact Wrestling viewership down for third straight week

Post by Big Red Machine » May 6th, '18, 01:52

Three weeks would be everything after the PPV. Looks like some people who had been giving them a shot are giving up.
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Re: Impact Wrestling viewership down for third straight week

Post by cero2k » May 6th, '18, 09:44

Big Red Machine wrote: May 6th, '18, 01:52 Three weeks would be everything after the PPV. Looks like some people who had been giving them a shot are giving up.
they've been going against NBA, NHL, and the NFL draft.
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Re: Impact Wrestling viewership down for third straight week

Post by Big Red Machine » May 6th, '18, 11:35

cero2k wrote: May 6th, '18, 09:44
Big Red Machine wrote: May 6th, '18, 01:52 Three weeks would be everything after the PPV. Looks like some people who had been giving them a shot are giving up.
they've been going against NBA, NHL, and the NFL draft.
But they're still down week to week for several straight weeks.And at least the NHL playoffs had their most populous round over with before the PPV.
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Re: Impact Wrestling viewership down for third straight week

Post by cero2k » May 6th, '18, 15:30

i actually don't think NHL would really hurt it, but NBA and NFL for sure would, but hey, maybe you're right, maybe they gave up on it, maybe it's hard to keep up with a show if you're not already in the practice of making time for it
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Re: Impact Wrestling viewership down for third straight week

Post by Big Red Machine » May 15th, '18, 16:15

Follow up:
WON Daily Update wrote: Even with a World title match (Pentagon Jr. vs. Eli Drake) on the show and there being no NBA playoffs on Thursday night, Impact ratings dropped very slightly this week. The show averaged 295,000 viewers, down from 299,000. Ratings have been on a bit of a downward trend since the hit that Impact took against the NFL draft on April 26th.
For comparison, this week's raw was actually up a bit even though they went up against the NBA playoffs.
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Re: Impact Wrestling viewership down for third straight week

Post by cero2k » May 15th, '18, 19:09

Big Red Machine wrote: May 15th, '18, 16:15 Follow up:
WON Daily Update wrote: Even with a World title match (Pentagon Jr. vs. Eli Drake) on the show and there being no NBA playoffs on Thursday night, Impact ratings dropped very slightly this week. The show averaged 295,000 viewers, down from 299,000. Ratings have been on a bit of a downward trend since the hit that Impact took against the NFL draft on April 26th.
For comparison, this week's raw was actually up a bit even though they went up against the NBA playoffs.
raw is a much bigger brand than impact and it's also the first week out of classes for a lot of people.
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Re: Impact Wrestling viewership down for third straight week

Post by Big Red Machine » May 15th, '18, 19:24

cero2k wrote: May 15th, '18, 19:09
Big Red Machine wrote: May 15th, '18, 16:15 Follow up:
WON Daily Update wrote: Even with a World title match (Pentagon Jr. vs. Eli Drake) on the show and there being no NBA playoffs on Thursday night, Impact ratings dropped very slightly this week. The show averaged 295,000 viewers, down from 299,000. Ratings have been on a bit of a downward trend since the hit that Impact took against the NFL draft on April 26th.
For comparison, this week's raw was actually up a bit even though they went up against the NBA playoffs.
raw is a much bigger brand than impact and it's also the first week out of classes for a lot of people.
I'm not saying Raw's number was good (it really wasn't). But the fact that Impact lost people without going up against the playoffs at all suggests that it wasn't the playoffs that were causing people to leave.
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Re: Impact Wrestling viewership down for third straight week

Post by KILLdozer » May 15th, '18, 19:52

You can't really compare Raw and impact...
When they come, they'll come at what you love.

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Re: Impact Wrestling viewership down for third straight week

Post by cero2k » May 15th, '18, 20:07

it's all in the wording of your first post, I don't think people are 'giving up', if numbers are going down, and let's assume that there's really no outside factor, it's not because Impact was bad that they 'gave up' or anything, it's people just going back to their usual life before they started watching Impact.

People's life is monotonous and pretty much programmed, you can break away from that for a while, but sooner or later, it all goes back to normal. The true show of people watching impact is not in the last 4 weeks, but rather the last 6 months that were better than the previous 12 months. I've been reviewing it since last year and I still can't get in the habit of watching it on thursday. Next month, the same is gonna happen with Lucha Underground, i'll watch the first 3-4 shows live, then i'll start doing it on thursdays, then fridays. I'm not in the having of watching wrestling on wednesday nights

Same with RAW, people just don't tune out, because sooner or later, that monotony brings them back that monday they have nothing to do, yet we've seen the ratings go down through the years. it took me about 2 years to really stop watching RAW because i would put it on every other day when I wasn't interested at all anymore.

Wrestling pays wwway to much attention to ratings sometimes in order to judge the quality of shows.
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Re: Impact Wrestling viewership down for third straight week

Post by Big Red Machine » May 15th, '18, 20:52

cero2k wrote: May 15th, '18, 20:07 it's all in the wording of your first post, I don't think people are 'giving up', if numbers are going down, and let's assume that there's really no outside factor, it's not because Impact was bad that they 'gave up' or anything, it's people just going back to their usual life before they started watching Impact.

People's life is monotonous and pretty much programmed, you can break away from that for a while, but sooner or later, it all goes back to normal. The true show of people watching impact is not in the last 4 weeks, but rather the last 6 months that were better than the previous 12 months. I've been reviewing it since last year and I still can't get in the habit of watching it on thursday. Next month, the same is gonna happen with Lucha Underground, i'll watch the first 3-4 shows live, then i'll start doing it on thursdays, then fridays. I'm not in the having of watching wrestling on wednesday nights

Same with RAW, people just don't tune out, because sooner or later, that monotony brings them back that monday they have nothing to do, yet we've seen the ratings go down through the years. it took me about 2 years to really stop watching RAW because i would put it on every other day when I wasn't interested at all anymore.

I agree with you that people will stick around out of habit even if they don't like the show, but I don't understand why you think there is a difference between "giving up" on the show and allowing it to slip out of being part of their routine. If the show is good enough, you will alter your routine to fit it in. I didn't used to watch 205 Live at all, but now I make sure to watch it every week because it has been so good.

In your analysis of Impact, I think you are ignoring one major point, which is that this drop-off happened right after the PPV, which is the most natural point for people to say "okay, I'll give them until this date to win me over."
cero2k wrote: May 15th, '18, 20:07 Wrestling pays wwway to much attention to ratings sometimes in order to judge the quality of shows.
I agree with you that people pay too much attention to ratings in order to judge a show's quality, but in TNA's case, that's really all we have because they rarely have PPVs (and don't release the buyrate when they do) and their tapings in very small buildings and don't collect gate from them and don't really run house shows (and certainly not on their own), then ratings are the only thing we have.
It's not that the show is objectively bad if the ratings are down, but if you're company with the national exposure of TNA or WWE (ROH isn't there yet, and has the complication of having its shown on at different times in different markets, some of them even overnight), then people tuning out is an indication that you're not hitting whatever their minimum threshold is to make the show feel worth their while, and if you're not making them feel like their not making the show feel worth their while, it's hard to turn them into paying customers for the PPVs and house shows (and, in TNA's case, I think their subscription service, too, since most of the "classic" TNA matches have gotten so many DVD releases. The only thing that protects ROH from this is that ROH put out so many crappy comps that were just a pile of every single match a guy had in a certain period that no one could buy all of them. That and the fact that most of TNA's great matches were isolated in the X-Division or involved Kurt Angle that you could track most of them down by getting very few compilations).
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Re: Impact Wrestling viewership down for third straight week

Post by cero2k » May 16th, '18, 09:37

Big Red Machine wrote: May 15th, '18, 20:52
I agree with you that people will stick around out of habit even if they don't like the show, but I don't understand why you think there is a difference between "giving up" on the show and allowing it to slip out of being part of their routine. If the show is good enough, you will alter your routine to fit it in. I didn't used to watch 205 Live at all, but now I make sure to watch it every week because it has been so good.

In your analysis of Impact, I think you are ignoring one major point, which is that this drop-off happened right after the PPV, which is the most natural point for people to say "okay, I'll give them until this date to win me over."
'Giving up' implies disappointment and that you (the fan) gave it your all and them (Impact) completely failed you. People didn't give up on Impact in this case, they saw the buzz, checked it out, and went back to their normal life because no one gets invested with just one show, and it was arguably a normal show. Even assuming that there were fans that really felt they were coming in as 'you have until this day to win me over', who does that for only 2 weeks? That sounds like they're coming in wanting for Impact to fail.

You are arguably a different type of person when it comes to watching, you're not a casual fan, and just like you with 205Live, some people did stay with Impact last year and now this year. That's my whole point, we're not gonna see just a huge influx of people stay there, and that applies to all promotions.

I am taking in consideration the PPV, and the ratings make total sense, there was a LOT of buzz going into that PPV and thus we got those extra 80-70K people. This is just like RAW that makes their biggest numbers when there is a buzz going around. I just don't think people go around thinking "okay, I'll give them until this date to win me over.", I think people are more likely to go watching Impact when they have the chance but since they're not accustomed to being home on Thursday night with nothing to do, they skip it after a few weeks. This is honestly something that i've done with ALL televised wrestling.
Big Red Machine wrote: May 15th, '18, 20:52 I agree with you that people pay too much attention to ratings in order to judge a show's quality, but in TNA's case, that's really all we have because they rarely have PPVs (and don't release the buyrate when they do) and their tapings in very small buildings and don't collect gate from them and don't really run house shows (and certainly not on their own), then ratings are the only thing we have.
It's not that the show is objectively bad if the ratings are down, but if you're company with the national exposure of TNA or WWE (ROH isn't there yet, and has the complication of having its shown on at different times in different markets, some of them even overnight), then people tuning out is an indication that you're not hitting whatever their minimum threshold is to make the show feel worth their while, and if you're not making them feel like their not making the show feel worth their while, it's hard to turn them into paying customers for the PPVs and house shows (and, in TNA's case, I think their subscription service, too, since most of the "classic" TNA matches have gotten so many DVD releases. The only thing that protects ROH from this is that ROH put out so many crappy comps that were just a pile of every single match a guy had in a certain period that no one could buy all of them. That and the fact that most of TNA's great matches were isolated in the X-Division or involved Kurt Angle that you could track most of them down by getting very few compilations).
That's just my argument, people are not necessarily tuning out, they're simply not accustomed to watching Impact and anything else takes priority over it, especially on a thursday night. The show is good, but it's also not revolutionary to bring in the masses, and i think it's unrealistic to think that out of nowhere, they would gain 100K cult followers one month to the next. I think regardless of the companies, we shouldn't base judgement of quality on ratings, PPV buys, or any of that, if anything we should do it like RAW and see how many people tune out from one hour to the next, or the overall comments from people, if the majority says that backlash sucked, maybe it did suck, and for the most part, i haven't seen any bad comments about Impact for a while.
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Re: Impact Wrestling viewership down for third straight week

Post by Big Red Machine » May 16th, '18, 10:38

cero2k wrote: May 16th, '18, 09:37
Big Red Machine wrote: May 15th, '18, 20:52
I agree with you that people will stick around out of habit even if they don't like the show, but I don't understand why you think there is a difference between "giving up" on the show and allowing it to slip out of being part of their routine. If the show is good enough, you will alter your routine to fit it in. I didn't used to watch 205 Live at all, but now I make sure to watch it every week because it has been so good.

In your analysis of Impact, I think you are ignoring one major point, which is that this drop-off happened right after the PPV, which is the most natural point for people to say "okay, I'll give them until this date to win me over."
'Giving up' implies disappointment and that you (the fan) gave it your all and them (Impact) completely failed you. People didn't give up on Impact in this case, they saw the buzz, checked it out, and went back to their normal life because no one gets invested with just one show, and it was arguably a normal show. Even assuming that there were fans that really felt they were coming in as 'you have until this day to win me over', who does that for only 2 weeks? That sounds like they're coming in wanting for Impact to fail.
I don't think it was only two weeks, though. You said yourself that ratings have been up for the past six months, which would roughly go back to when the announcement that Callis & D'Amore were taking over was made. This was their first PPV. It's a reasonable amount of time to try a product out and then see how they pay things off.
Maybe "giving up" makes it sound harsher than it should, but the idea is that they gave Impact the chance to convince them that they should go out of their way to watch their show every week, and Impact failed to do so.
cero2k wrote: May 16th, '18, 09:37 You are arguably a different type of person when it comes to watching, you're not a casual fan, and just like you with 205Live, some people did stay with Impact last year and now this year. That's my whole point, we're not gonna see just a huge influx of people stay there, and that applies to all promotions.
I think that if the show was good enough, it would have made more people stick around. If 205 Live goes back to not being worth watching I'm sure we'll see those numbers go back down, too.
cero2k wrote: May 16th, '18, 09:37 I am taking in consideration the PPV, and the ratings make total sense, there was a LOT of buzz going into that PPV and thus we got those extra 80-70K people. This is just like RAW that makes their biggest numbers when there is a buzz going around. I just don't think people go around thinking "okay, I'll give them until this date to win me over.", I think people are more likely to go watching Impact when they have the chance but since they're not accustomed to being home on Thursday night with nothing to do, they skip it after a few weeks. This is honestly something that i've done with ALL televised wrestling.
I think you're ignoring the fact that this is a company that has burned people with false promises of change so many times before. They've had "buzz" in the past and it always fizzled out into something bad when it came time to actually pay things off. This isn't a case of someone first discovering a show or rediscovering it or whatever. This is a known entity that people have learned to be wary of, but were willing to give it another shot and they didn't like what they saw enough to keep watching.
cero2k wrote: May 16th, '18, 09:37
Big Red Machine wrote: May 15th, '18, 20:52 I agree with you that people pay too much attention to ratings in order to judge a show's quality, but in TNA's case, that's really all we have because they rarely have PPVs (and don't release the buyrate when they do) and their tapings in very small buildings and don't collect gate from them and don't really run house shows (and certainly not on their own), then ratings are the only thing we have.
It's not that the show is objectively bad if the ratings are down, but if you're company with the national exposure of TNA or WWE (ROH isn't there yet, and has the complication of having its shown on at different times in different markets, some of them even overnight), then people tuning out is an indication that you're not hitting whatever their minimum threshold is to make the show feel worth their while, and if you're not making them feel like their not making the show feel worth their while, it's hard to turn them into paying customers for the PPVs and house shows (and, in TNA's case, I think their subscription service, too, since most of the "classic" TNA matches have gotten so many DVD releases. The only thing that protects ROH from this is that ROH put out so many crappy comps that were just a pile of every single match a guy had in a certain period that no one could buy all of them. That and the fact that most of TNA's great matches were isolated in the X-Division or involved Kurt Angle that you could track most of them down by getting very few compilations).
That's just my argument, people are not necessarily tuning out, they're simply not accustomed to watching Impact and anything else takes priority over it, especially on a thursday night. The show is good, but it's also not revolutionary to bring in the masses, and i think it's unrealistic to think that out of nowhere, they would gain 100K cult followers one month to the next. I think regardless of the companies, we shouldn't base judgement of quality on ratings, PPV buys, or any of that, if anything we should do it like RAW and see how many people tune out from one hour to the next, or the overall comments from people, if the majority says that backlash sucked, maybe it did suck, and for the most part, i haven't seen any bad comments about Impact for a while.
TNA is a situation where I think most of the critics have finally given up on the show because it's not worth their time anymore. WWE (meaning Raw and SD) mostly isn't good, either, but they have the advantages of 1) being probably people's only outlet to relate to casual fans they meet, and 2) exclusivity of top talents who are occasionally allowed to put on awesome matches. If TNA was the only place we could see Aries, Fenix, etc. then people would be watching Impact every week, but that's not the case.

I would venture to guess that most of the people still watching are either fans who will watch anything but aren't the internet type, or are TNA Mecca-esque people, or are people who started watching TNA more recently and thus haven't heard them cry wolf a million times, so that this time, when they cry wolf and it's just a fox rather than there being nothing there, they say "well... they just exaggerated" rather than getting angry because once again there was no wolf and deciding that this was the last straw.
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Re: Impact Wrestling viewership down for third straight week

Post by cero2k » May 16th, '18, 11:51

Big Red Machine wrote: May 16th, '18, 10:38 I don't think it was only two weeks, though. You said yourself that ratings have been up for the past six months, which would roughly go back to when the announcement that Callis & D'Amore were taking over was made. This was their first PPV. It's a reasonable amount of time to try a product out and then see how they pay things off.
Maybe "giving up" makes it sound harsher than it should, but the idea is that they gave Impact the chance to convince them that they should go out of their way to watch their show every week, and Impact failed to do so.
the overall numbers right now are around the 300K and that's the average for some months. those 380K that went down from, IS the buzz and it was only for about 2-3 weeks.

"but the idea is that they gave Impact the chance to convince them that they should go out of their way to watch their show every week, and Impact failed to do so."

that is exactly what i don't believe, aside from you, i really don't know people who think like that, those people that watched and left are people that were curious of the buzz and didn't find something that now needed to be a priority on their Thursday nights, that does not imply that Impact is failing the fans.
Big Red Machine wrote: May 16th, '18, 10:38 I think that if the show was good enough, it would have made more people stick around. If 205 Live goes back to not being worth watching I'm sure we'll see those numbers go back down, too.
The show has made people stick around, that's why they're more steadily around the 300K numbers now. Impact is a hard to find no name promotion, it's not just going to keep people one day to another. I find it hard to believe that 205Live has increased that much just because it has good wrestling.
Big Red Machine wrote: May 16th, '18, 10:38 I think you're ignoring the fact that this is a company that has burned people with false promises of change so many times before. They've had "buzz" in the past and it always fizzled out into something bad when it came time to actually pay things off. This isn't a case of someone first discovering a show or rediscovering it or whatever. This is a known entity that people have learned to be wary of, but were willing to give it another shot and they didn't like what they saw enough to keep watching.
I'm not ignoring it, except buzz here was not about false promises, the buzz is straight up people saying that Impact has been really good, that they got guys like Aries and Penta and Eli Drake. This is not the case of 'new impact' blah blah, the buzz right now is that people are liking the product, that people are sensing small changes. Maybe they didn't like what they saw enough to keep watching, but that is completely different from 'giving up' and impact 'failing', this is just 'i got other stuff to do'. It is completely understandable to watch a show and not 'like it enough' (key word: enough) to keep watching, in a world with SOO much content, you have to exceed to make people change their every day life for a show.

It is almost 180 change from years ago where people would actively talk about how bad TNA was. Don Callis said it in an interview, it's gonna take time.
Big Red Machine wrote: May 16th, '18, 10:38 TNA is a situation where I think most of the critics have finally given up on the show because it's not worth their time anymore. WWE (meaning Raw and SD) mostly isn't good, either, but they have the advantages of 1) being probably people's only outlet to relate to casual fans they meet, and 2) exclusivity of top talents who are occasionally allowed to put on awesome matches. If TNA was the only place we could see Aries, Fenix, etc. then people would be watching Impact every week, but that's not the case.

I would venture to guess that most of the people still watching are either fans who will watch anything but aren't the internet type, or are TNA Mecca-esque people, or are people who started watching TNA more recently and thus haven't heard them cry wolf a million times, so that this time, when they cry wolf and it's just a fox rather than there being nothing there, they say "well... they just exaggerated" rather than getting angry because once again there was no wolf and deciding that this was the last straw.
it's understandable that critics don't want to put their time in it. it's not as mainstream, so supply and demand when it comes to covering topics. Dave said on monday that's why he won't review shows like Stardom, PROGRESS, or Evolve, etc. he doesn't value putting time in it because they're not breakout shows and not a lot of people talk about them, doesn't mean they're bad or that they don't have a fanbase.

I think you're right on the fanbase, like i said before, it's going to be a majority of fans who are already in the lifestyle of watching, and that's how mostly everything is. That's RAW, it's the same people that always watch because they've been doing it for the last 20 yrs and regardless of how bad it gets, they'll be there, every week, every PPV. NJPW and Bullet Club i'd argue are the only things that are getting new fans on a monthly basis.
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Re: Impact Wrestling viewership down for third straight week

Post by Big Red Machine » May 16th, '18, 12:29

cero2k wrote: May 16th, '18, 11:51
Big Red Machine wrote: May 16th, '18, 10:38 I don't think it was only two weeks, though. You said yourself that ratings have been up for the past six months, which would roughly go back to when the announcement that Callis & D'Amore were taking over was made. This was their first PPV. It's a reasonable amount of time to try a product out and then see how they pay things off.
Maybe "giving up" makes it sound harsher than it should, but the idea is that they gave Impact the chance to convince them that they should go out of their way to watch their show every week, and Impact failed to do so.
the overall numbers right now are around the 300K and that's the average for some months. those 380K that went down from, IS the buzz and it was only for about 2-3 weeks.

"but the idea is that they gave Impact the chance to convince them that they should go out of their way to watch their show every week, and Impact failed to do so."

that is exactly what i don't believe, aside from you, i really don't know people who think like that, those people that watched and left are people that were curious of the buzz and didn't find something that now needed to be a priority on their Thursday nights, that does not imply that Impact is failing the fans.
Why doesn't it? Or if not failing fans, they're failing the potential fans they're trying to attract by not attracting them. If the goal is to get these people to watch the show and people haven't been convinced to make watching it a priority then isn't that failing in their goal?
cero2k wrote: May 16th, '18, 11:51
Big Red Machine wrote: May 16th, '18, 10:38 I think that if the show was good enough, it would have made more people stick around. If 205 Live goes back to not being worth watching I'm sure we'll see those numbers go back down, too.
The show has made people stick around, that's why they're more steadily around the 300K numbers now. Impact is a hard to find no name promotion, it's not just going to keep people one day to another. I find it hard to believe that 205Live has increased that much just because it has good wrestling.
I completely disagree with the assertion that Impact is "a hard to find no name promotion." Yes, it is now on some goofy-ass channel that you probably wouldn't watch for anything else, but you'll still catch it as you stroll through your guide, and it's not like they're Paragon Pro just getting on TV for the first time. They were on SPIKE TV in prime time for years, with major national stars like Sting, Angle, Hogan, Flair, etc. A majority of wrestling fans know about TNA/Impact Wrestling. If they wanted to find it, they would, but they have no desire to watch it, in many cases because they already gave it several chances and stopped believing that it would ever be worth watching again. Is that fair? Not necessarily. But that's the baggage that this company has to deal with, just like ROH has to deal with an inconsistent TV schedule and a reputation for indy production levels, and WWE has to deal with all of their baggage. That's not the same as a promotion that hasn't had major exposure before (like, say, MLW) that a large majority of fans probably don't even know exists.

I don't know the 205 Live numbers either, but I hear a lot more people talking about it, and many of them are people who say they didn't used to watch it because it was pointless but now that it's good and has direction they're watching it.
cero2k wrote: May 16th, '18, 11:51
Big Red Machine wrote: May 16th, '18, 10:38 I think you're ignoring the fact that this is a company that has burned people with false promises of change so many times before. They've had "buzz" in the past and it always fizzled out into something bad when it came time to actually pay things off. This isn't a case of someone first discovering a show or rediscovering it or whatever. This is a known entity that people have learned to be wary of, but were willing to give it another shot and they didn't like what they saw enough to keep watching.
I'm not ignoring it, except buzz here was not about false promises, the buzz is straight up people saying that Impact has been really good, that they got guys like Aries and Penta and Eli Drake. This is not the case of 'new impact' blah blah, the buzz right now is that people are liking the product, that people are sensing small changes. Maybe they didn't like what they saw enough to keep watching, but that is completely different from 'giving up' and impact 'failing', this is just 'i got other stuff to do'. It is completely understandable to watch a show and not 'like it enough' (key word: enough) to keep watching, in a world with SOO much content, you have to exceed to make people change their every day life for a show.

It is almost 180 change from years ago where people would actively talk about how bad TNA was. Don Callis said it in an interview, it's gonna take time.
Right. And part of the TNA's baggage is that for them to get to a point where people will believe that it has become good enough for them to make a priority will take a lot more of an improvement than someone who gave up on a promotion like Ring of Honor which didn't have years of sh*t programming and false promises. For TNA, just being "good" isn't going to be "good enough" for most people because their well-deserved reputation makes it such that they have a much deeper hole to climb out of than other companies would while trying to recover lost buzz.
cero2k wrote: May 16th, '18, 11:51
Big Red Machine wrote: May 16th, '18, 10:38 TNA is a situation where I think most of the critics have finally given up on the show because it's not worth their time anymore. WWE (meaning Raw and SD) mostly isn't good, either, but they have the advantages of 1) being probably people's only outlet to relate to casual fans they meet, and 2) exclusivity of top talents who are occasionally allowed to put on awesome matches. If TNA was the only place we could see Aries, Fenix, etc. then people would be watching Impact every week, but that's not the case.

I would venture to guess that most of the people still watching are either fans who will watch anything but aren't the internet type, or are TNA Mecca-esque people, or are people who started watching TNA more recently and thus haven't heard them cry wolf a million times, so that this time, when they cry wolf and it's just a fox rather than there being nothing there, they say "well... they just exaggerated" rather than getting angry because once again there was no wolf and deciding that this was the last straw.
it's understandable that critics don't want to put their time in it. it's not as mainstream, so supply and demand when it comes to covering topics. Dave said on monday that's why he won't review shows like Stardom, PROGRESS, or Evolve, etc. he doesn't value putting time in it because they're not breakout shows and not a lot of people talk about them, doesn't mean they're bad or that they don't have a fanbase.

I think you're right on the fanbase, like i said before, it's going to be a majority of fans who are already in the lifestyle of watching, and that's how mostly everything is. That's RAW, it's the same people that always watch because they've been doing it for the last 20 yrs and regardless of how bad it gets, they'll be there, every week, every PPV. NJPW and Bullet Club i'd argue are the only things that are getting new fans on a monthly basis.
When I say "critics" I don't mean Dave and Wade, and the "wrestling media." I mean "people who have criticized the promotion in the past." Wrestling fans who have watched the show and had problems with it in the past. Your random schmoe sitting in the living room to watch some good wrestling on TV, not because reviewing wrestling is their jobs. Some of those people (like us) will review it as a hobby, but none of us are getting paid to write for a wrestling website and thus need to prioritize our time in favor of stuff like WWE, ROH, NJPW, or CMLL just because they get the most clicks.
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Re: Impact Wrestling viewership down for third straight week

Post by cero2k » May 17th, '18, 10:15

Big Red Machine wrote: May 16th, '18, 12:29
Why doesn't it? Or if not failing fans, they're failing the potential fans they're trying to attract by not attracting them. If the goal is to get these people to watch the show and people haven't been convinced to make watching it a priority then isn't that failing in their goal?

I completely disagree with the assertion that Impact is "a hard to find no name promotion." Yes, it is now on some goofy-ass channel that you probably wouldn't watch for anything else, but you'll still catch it as you stroll through your guide, and it's not like they're Paragon Pro just getting on TV for the first time. They were on SPIKE TV in prime time for years, with major national stars like Sting, Angle, Hogan, Flair, etc. A majority of wrestling fans know about TNA/Impact Wrestling. If they wanted to find it, they would, but they have no desire to watch it, in many cases because they already gave it several chances and stopped believing that it would ever be worth watching again. Is that fair? Not necessarily. But that's the baggage that this company has to deal with, just like ROH has to deal with an inconsistent TV schedule and a reputation for indy production levels, and WWE has to deal with all of their baggage. That's not the same as a promotion that hasn't had major exposure before (like, say, MLW) that a large majority of fans probably don't even know exists.


Right. And part of the TNA's baggage is that for them to get to a point where people will believe that it has become good enough for them to make a priority will take a lot more of an improvement than someone who gave up on a promotion like Ring of Honor which didn't have years of sh*t programming and false promises. For TNA, just being "good" isn't going to be "good enough" for most people because their well-deserved reputation makes it such that they have a much deeper hole to climb out of than other companies would while trying to recover lost buzz.

When I say "critics" I don't mean Dave and Wade, and the "wrestling media." I mean "people who have criticized the promotion in the past." Wrestling fans who have watched the show and had problems with it in the past. Your random schmoe sitting in the living room to watch some good wrestling on TV, not because reviewing wrestling is their jobs. Some of those people (like us) will review it as a hobby, but none of us are getting paid to write for a wrestling website and thus need to prioritize our time in favor of stuff like WWE, ROH, NJPW, or CMLL just because they get the most clicks.
that's a completely different fail though, they're failing one of their own many goals, one of the most unreal ones actually, but they're not failing the fans which is the main reason of this discussion, fans are not 'giving up' because they were failed at by the promotion. And even then, it would be incredibly unrealistic for them and us to just think that everything is going to change one week to another, hell one month to another, everyone knows about their baggage and non one let's it go, so yeah, being 'good' is not gonna be 'good enough' for a lot of people, but that's where it starts, because if they keep going, good CAN become 'good enough' given time to let things play out.

All those 100K people that came and went, they didn't give up because they gave Impact an ultimatum, no, they came to see what the buzz is about, they were able to see some of the new faces, they saw that the wrestling is better, then finishes are not shit finishes, and it wasn't good enough to become a die hard fan, but when more buzz comes up, those fans will hopefully won't carry the baggage of Dixie Carter, but they'll remember that Impact wasn't that bad last time when they saw it.
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