1. There Are Other Things To Watch On Television
No matter what the company does, the fact that television is full of other things to watch again will only hurt them. Not only is the National Football League back on Monday nights (the games pull in
monster ratings every week), but The Big Bang Theory, Dancing With The Stars, The Voice, Gotham, Scorpion, Sleepy Hollow, The Blacklist, Castle, NCIS: Los Angeles, and more are also back on Monday nights. Whether you like those shows or not, they're big ratings draws. Friday nights sees The Amazing Race, Hawaii Five-0, Shark Tank, Dateline NBC, The Mysteries Of Laura, Blue Bloods, and 20/20 as competition for Smackdown. All of the shows listed for Monday and Friday don't even take into account the endless options on cable, or on other platforms like Netflix, making it even worse for WWE. Now that the Summer is over, new seasons of shows have premiered, there is just less reason for people to watch wrestling, especially when that wrestling isn't delivering like we want it to. You would think WWE would want to try and pull out all the stops at this time of year, trying to keep those fans who are on the fence about watching something else from changing the channel. This is a very key time, even though it's one that is expected to be bad. If you can improve the product and the ratings in September and October, you stand to really get things heated up once January rolls around, and all of those people who went to watch other things are returning to wrestling. We're not even discussing what a hot product in September and October will do when those fans who want to watch something else hear about what WWE is doing in their absence. WWE put the title on who?!? So-and-so returned?!? Such-and-such made their debut?!? That gets them thinking that maybe they need to keep checking in on the product, instead of missing it and keeping up through recaps and tweets. While we knew this would be a bad time for the company, there are ways of at least trying to improve. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem as though they care enough to really try.