Such was the importance of WCW's demise on the WWF product that we're going to need two points to cover it. Firstly we should address the 'downfall of WCW' and in the next page we will address the 'implementation of WCW into the WWF'. The demise of WCW was an obvious indicator to WWF that the popularity of wrestling was about to be ruined. While part of WCW's woes were down to viewers choosing to watch the WWF, and also down to WCW's creative pitfalls, you can also say that the death of the company was a sign that wrestling popularity in general was on the way down. When business had been hot, the industry had managed to retain a fanbase across three different promotions: WWF, WCW and ECW. The fact that two of these entities had gone out of business by early 2001 wasn't just a sign of the WWF being dominant, it was a sign that wrestling was no longer a 'cool' thing to watch. Just like the dot com bubble, the wrestling bubble had burst. Another part of this being a reason for the WWF's loss of popularity is that they lost their main and only competitor. Vince no longer had to try hard to win viewers over, people simply had no other wrestling to watch. An obvious malaise set into WWF creative, they certainly weren't the same as they had been when they had competition. They no longer needed to think to outsmart anyone, they got lazy, fans got bored.
