10 Lessons WWE Can Learn From The Biggest SummerSlam Buy-Rates Ever

By Elliott Binks / August 13, 2016

I’m reliably informed by the internet that there’s no such thing as a recipe for success. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

But while there may not be any fail safe method of guaranteeing future fortunes, we can always look back and try to learn from the past. And when it comes to the SummerSlam pay-per-view, we have a wealth of data available to us (most notably, the show's buy-rates) with which we can do just that.

And so based on a rather bodged logic, what can be learned from looking back at the biggest buy-rates in SummerSlam's history? Can we work out which elements make a show a success and help it bring in the most buys? Who knows, but this article has a crack at answering those questions. Firstly, though, a little bit of housekeeping.

For the sake of this article, we’ll be looking at actual outright buys rather than buy-rates, as these numbers are more widely available for each SummerSlam PPV. And I appreciate that some of the points we’ll be discussing aren't necessarily the sole factors behind a show's success, as there's a great deal else that goes into the production of a PPV. But there are still some interesting trends to be spotted from over the years nonetheless.

And who knows, maybe we'll even have some fun along the way. So let's get to it.

10. The Wacky Stuff Works

Call it what you will, but over the years SummerSlam has seen its fair share of wacky, campy, corny goings on, with gimmicky matches aplenty. And whilst that may not sit well with certain swathes of the audience, for the most part it seems to have brought success.

Some such examples include 1999’s Kiss My A*s match, a Hair vs. Hair bout the previous year, and 2005’s staging of a singles match for Kurt Angle’s Olympic gold medal, as well as a battle for the custody of Rey Mysterio’s son Dominick. Hardly the most conventional of stipulations…

And yet, each of these shows yielded at least 600,000 buys, making them three of the four top-performing PPV’s in all of SummerSlam’s history.

Now, you could easily argue that it was the accompanying matches that really convinced fans to cough up the dough for these shows. But either way, this seems to suggest that even the wackiest of stipulations haven't necessarily been much of a deterrent to buyers.