How AEW's Numbers OBJECTIVELY Prove Its Success

Just one fall - not even a match - has ended via disqualification. There's a gravity, a cause and effect, to everything. You can count on a decisive finish as a virtual guarantee, and that finish almost invariably shapes the arc of both the winner and the loser. Everything means something most of the time.

But the real data - that cannot be disputed - proves that AEW cannot be judged as anything other than a smash success. AEW originally signed a deal with TNT without a guaranteed rights fee. Production costs of $500,000 per show were covered by the network, and until the deal was very quickly renegotiated in January 2020, money was generated through a 50/50 split of advertisement revenue. The aim was to break even and, all going perfectly, generate modest profits by the end of 2020. That aim was smashed when TNT paid AEW a rights fee of $174 million spread out until 2023. Considerably less than that paid by USA and FOX for RAW and SmackDown respectively, per the initial estimate, the annual fee exceeded that paid to NXT by USA by $30 million. That was until rumours surfaced, through obscured or conflated financial reporting, that NXT might not be in receipt of anything significantly comparable to a traditional fee in itself.

This might be the minimum number, too; Dave Meltzer reported in the January 20, 2020 Wrestling Observer Newsletter that the "The deal has annual escalators built into the contract".

This deal made formal the notion that AEW, calculably, is the number two wrestling promotion on the planet. Given New Japan Pro Wrestling's stunning history and seminal resurgence, this is a remarkable achievement on the part of Tony Khan.

So why did TNT front the money so quickly into Dynamite's tenure?

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