10 Decisions That Helped Kill WWE Raw's Ratings
9. Botching The Invasion
Even though the move to TNN cost Raw ratings, there was a major opportunity to increase business right around the corner. WCW was failing badly, and with WWE the frontrunner to purchase the company, the 3,000,000 fans who watched Nitro every week would now become Raw viewers. Right?
That could have happened, had WWE treated the WCW brand with respect. Instead, Vince McMahon decided not to shell out the money necessary to get the top stars from the dead promotion, and he had no interest in making the talent he did have look anything but inferior to WWE's stars. Talent from ECW joined the WCW guys to form "The Alliance," but the top stars of the new stable were WWE defectors, robbing the storyline of any real draw.
WCW's former fans weren't the only ones who noticed. Many of the WWE fans who came around during the Attitude Era were turned off by the mishandling of what should have been a dream feud - even the WWE faithful knew stars like Booker T and Diamond Dallas Page, and they weren't happy with their usage. 2001 should have been a year of major growth for WWE, but they had fewer fans in December than they did in January.