10 Fascinating WWE SummerSlam 2009 Facts
1. The Buyrate Dropped More Than 20% From The Previous Year
Between the rise of illegal streaming sites, the decline in WWE's paying customers, and perhaps the tedious programming of the PG era (or the "we love celebrities and vice versa" era), buyrates across the board continued to plummet for WWE, outside of WrestleMania. SummerSlam 2009 was explicit proof of that downswing.
SummerSlam 2009 pulled in 369,000 buys, down almost 23 percent from the 477,000 buys from the previous year. The last time SummerSlam had that bad of a one-year decline was from 1995 to 1996, when the number of buys fell from 205,000 to 157,000 (23 percent as well).
As noted before, UFC 100 the previous month had lapped SummerSlam in triplicate, raking in 1.6 million buys for Lesnar's mauling of Frank Mir. That stood as the highest number of buys for any one pay-per-view between the two companies, until Conor McGregor and Nate Diaz's highly-publicized rematch in August 2016 did 1.65 million buys.