10 Reasons WWE Is Losing Their Audience
How has RAW lost 7 million viewers since the Monday Night War?
No matter how you look at it, seven million people is a lot of people.
That's how many viewers have stopped watching pro-wrestling on Monday nights since the demise of WCW in 2001. At the height of the 'Monday Night War', the pro-wrestling industry generated a combined total of 10 million viewers on a regular basis thanks to the weekly programs of WWE's Monday Night Raw and WCW's Monday Nitro.
After WCW ceased operations and Vince McMahon purchased its video library, Nitro was no more leaving Raw as the only show in town. If you want to watch wrestling on Monday nights, you didn't have to choose anymore as the choice was simple: Raw was all that was left.
One might think that without direct competition from WCW, it would've been smooth sailing for WWE from then on and in many ways, it was. Lately though, a different story has become apparent as Raw's television ratings continue to decline, recently reaching all-time lows. Raw now averages under three million viewers every week (down from 10 million pre-WCW). That's a worryingly huge loss.
So what happened? Where did all those wrestling fans go? Why have they tuned out?
We uncover all that and more as we look at 10 Ways WWE is losing their audience.
10. Few Events Are Truly Special
WWE is losing their audience for many reasons, but the first one is that they rarely provide truly "special events" anymore.
In 2016, pay-per-views have ballooned to 20 (including NXT) and will probably far exceed that number come 2017. Of all main roster shows, only the Royal Rumble, WrestleMania, and SummerSlam even have the potential to feel truly special. Unfortunately, more often than not these events fail to deliver any long-lasting developments or impact.
Take WWE's supposed biggest show of all-time, for example. What happened at WrestleMania 32 that mattered even one month, much less one year later? Shane lost to The Undertaker yet the match's stipulation was ignored. AJ Styles lost clean to Chris Jericho yet was announced the #1 contender the very next night on Raw. The League of Nations were supposedly given "the rub" from legends Steve Austin, Shawn Michaels, and Mick Foley yet were split days following the event with half the group leaving the company within a month.
Finally, the main event was as predictable as it gets when Roman Reigns defeated Triple H for the WWE Championship. Less than three months later, Roman was suspended and lost the title while Triple H has made only one appearance since.
In other words, these shows don't ultimately matter. It's all just filler.
In retrospect, outside of the large attendance and a few one-off appearances, WrestleMania wasn't special and that's been the case with nearly every show WWE presents.