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New data on why adults are no longer watching wrestling

Bobby Barrows

Trans Rights
There are many people out there such as myself who love wrestling but just can't stand the current product. 20 million people watched every week during the monday night wars. Nowadays they would be extremely lucky to get more than 2 million

This was also when television was literally the only source of entertainment. The key reason people stopped watching professional wrestling is that the bubble burst, plain and simple. The death of WCW and ECW woke a lot of people up to the fact that, in their eyes, there's no reason to watch wrestling anymore.
 

Kross Rhodes

Israel Has the Right to Exist
This was also when television was literally the only source of entertainment. The key reason people stopped watching professional wrestling is that the bubble burst, plain and simple. The death of WCW and ECW woke a lot of people up to the fact that, in their eyes, there's no reason to watch wrestling anymore.
You first sentence and the rest of your paragraph are conflicting reasons.

The television landscape has changed, but if wrestling was still as compelling as it was people would still be tuning in. Grey's Anatomy still garners 8 million people a week. Other forms of entertainment don't matter if people WANT to watch what you got going on.

The second part of your paragraph is true. The death of WCW and ECW is when the bubble burst. Over a decade and half before the TV landscape changing effected anything. The reason for this is two-fold. There were fans even in 2001 that didn't like the WWF and had no interest.

The other reason is WWF got complacent once its true competition was over and slowly began to delude their product. Every year losing more of its viewers to other programs. Never really replacing the aging demographic. And the funny thing is WWE's demo is still skewed higher.
 

Dale

Super Moderator
Social Media.

There is literally gifs, streamables, youtube videos of everything on the show immediately after it's happened that you no longer need to spend the time to sit down and watch the show worrying that you might miss something.

Everybody has people they follow who's opinion they trust where they can take from their reviews what matches / segments they need to skip or watch.

Times have changed and so is the way people consume things nowadays. No longer do you have to set your VCR to record wrestling, go to school then come home and watch it to form your own opinion and keep up to date with everything that is going on. Now you can be waiting at the bus stop or train station travelling to work and be caught up on everything in the 30 mins / 1 hour it takes you to commute.
 

Lady Redfield

Itchy tasty
Yeah, social media is a huge downfall, hardly anything is a surprise anymore. Even back in the day when it was exposed that wrestling was scripted, it was still awesome to watch because there was no social media. Now, I can't log on to the internet without something being spilled, it really takes away from it. I get that there has to be some chatter to get things going at times, but, for example, I read yesterday that a big name star is supposed to appear at full gear Saturday and there was speculation that it was Sting. Let us assume this is true (and, uh, sorry if people just read that now and didn't know, but, I assume being wrestling fans in a wrestling forum, everyone has heard this), it would be so much more awesome imo if no one knew about this big name and they came out. I get it, lets get people to buy in to the PPV to see who it is...but it just takes away some of the hype for me that would be there if I was watching and had no idea this person was going to show up at all.

The storylines are mostly piss for me. It's like it's okay to have these lazy writers (mostly WWE), they just don't care what trash they put put there, it's annoying. I have watched wrestling for over 30 years, never stopped, so, I have been in periods of complete garbage wrestling before, but, this time, the streak of trash is just so consistent for the longest time, I am just dying for a turn around.
 

Deezy

DZ PZ
There wasn't 20 million people watching....the height of popularity was a shared audience.

Both companies conflated the numbers and I've been sayung that for years and it took two of the most boring podcasts to vindicate me.

People stopped watching because they grew up and started watching other shit. ...the ones who stayed are the ones who are driving people away with their need to be catered too, which niches the product even more than it is.....the response for goofy shit that people in creative pay attention to further doing so and this dumb ass notion of forced inclusion. ....naw.

Want rasslin to be better.and get more popular? Have it be what it actually is.....a soap opera for rednecks.

Guess what? Their popularity zenith was just that.
 
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