Why Vince McMahon Doesn't Fear AEW (But SHOULD)

Debating the merits of Raw/SmackDown (and even NXT) versus AEW so often boils down to two sides completely unable to understand the other that the whole thing ends up redundant. Personal subjectivity defines all our tastes in everything, and that's discounting other factors such as age, location, context and historic interest.

So instead, which statistic do you want first? The projected total attendances for AEW's show in New York versus WWE's in the City so synonymous with the company that a generation of wrestlers still use it as shorthand for the brand? The ascending July 2021 Dynamite total viewerships next to Raw's tumbling numbers from the same timeframe? The demographic dominance of AEW's flagship compared to NXT's own reach during and after the massively one-sided Wednesday Night War?

CM Punk - he of 2021's biggest ongoing wrestling story courtesy of a potential August 20th AEW debut - infamously pied off the "glad-handing Yes Men" during his Pipe Bomb, but one of the latest (and seemingly most successful) in the spot Nick Khan had some perfect corporate-speak lined up to back up the bluster of his boss that tried to talk around all of these minor inconveniences. He said;

"If it was up to us, people could be up 24 hours a day watching content from different content providers, hopefully including ours. We don’t look at any organisation particularly as competition. Yet we see everything as competitive with what we’re trying to do in terms of eyeballs."

But are those eyeballs "linear", Nick? And do they even like any of what they're seeing?

CONT'D...