Paul Heyman And His Clients
Brock Lesnar: +450,000 Viewers
Paul Heyman: +320,000 Viewers (We'll talk about CM Punk separately.) Paul Heyman is terrific professional wrestling manager. His character is conniving, petty, greedy, mean, smarmy, insincere and terribly effective. When Brock Lesnar returned to the WWE on April 2, 2012 to F-5 John Cena (1.036 million viewership gain), it wasn't long before Brock's "legal advisor" Paul Heyman returned to the fold. With the former UFC Heavyweight champion working a one-of-a-kind relaxed schedule (Lesnar makes millions to work but a handful of Raw and PPV events each year), it was more important than ever that his mouthpiece keep up the pressure through interviews and confrontations with HHH and Stephanie McMahon. Like other high-priced part-timers, Brock Lesnar experiences significant viewership growth whenever he's on the screen (the only time he's ever lost viewers was during a video package about his feud with HHH). For instance, destroying Triple H's office in Stamford CT delivered a swell of nearly 900,000 viewers on the 5/6/13 episode of Raw. With Brock only working part time, by September 2012, Heyman had slithered alongside CM Punk (a noted "Paul Heyman Guy") to become his advocate and manager throughout Punk's record-setting modern title run. Punk with or without Heyman was already an established talent, so one could debate the effect of Heyman's companionship, but the pair certainly exuded confidence throughout their pairing (and later feud).
Curtis Axel: +222,000 Viewers
Rather, it's another Paul Heyman client that best demonstrates that power of Paul. Michael McGillicutty (the son of Curt Hennig) regularly lost viewers throughout 2011 (his average impact was losing 295,000 viewers). That's even when he was wrestling top talent such as Randy Orton (2/28/11, -95k viewers) or John Cena (7/11/11, -475k viewers). However, when Paul Heyman repackaged and redebuted the wrestler as Curtis Axel on May 20, 2013 Raw the segment gained 365,000 viewers. His main event matches against Cena and HHH represented three consecutive weeks of adding more 400,000 to 600,000 viewers. Still, like many superstars, his drawing power was really driven through programming and opponents. When Axel wasn't feuding with CM Punk, his singles matches with people like R-Truth returned to McGillicutty-like numbers losing 546,000 viewers. Clearly, for someone like Joe Hennig, part of the power of being associated with Paul Heyman was being in the shadow of important people.