Maze_ posted... Dunno if this was a real question or rhetorical >_>
But in the 90s WCW and WWF had competing flagship shows on Mondays. Raw and Nitro. This was called "The Monday Night Wars" with an estimated 5-12 million people watching (or flipping between) the shows every week for years.
This made both shows become EXTREMELY ratings obsessed with the concept being whoever got the highest rating "won" and also brought in a bucketload of ad revenue
Focus on increasing ratings became the focal point of the show, more important than the wrestling and storylines. Especially in WCW which in the late 90s/early 2000s rarely had a match that went on more than 200 seconds and every few minutes something wacky happened. IT was pretty much what we would call Tik-Tok now.
Fast Forward to today, all the kids who grew up watching that STILL use ratings to determine whether or not a wrestling show is good. Including AEW's founder Tony Khan. Who brought up AEW's initial good ratings repeatedly in the face of criticism.
We've had 2 decades of "You can tell WWE sucks now because less Americans are watching Live cable TV than they used to in 1998" and 5 years of "You can AEW sucks because they dropped from 2 million to 700,000 viewers!"
When you point out that in terms of eyeballs, more people globally are watching wrestling than ever before and it's making bank, they get really really really angry and insecure because the TV ratings don't reflect that.
Probably not explaining it very well if you haven't been around for the ride. But basically wrestling fans have been conditioned and trained to think ratings are really really important. Including the dude running AEW.
Not rhetorical. I watched wrestling in the mid-2000s but obviously did not give a fuck about the ratings of how each WWE program compared to that week's TNA program or whatever. And now for the last few years, if I see a wrestling thread on any website bumped to the front page it's either because some super nostalgia-bait stuff just happened or because everyone's debating ratings for some reason. It gives me Trump vibes, like if you need to constantly explain to everyone how massively popular your rallies and your crowd sizes are, then they're probably not as massive as you say. If wrestling fans are trying to convince themselves and each other how popular their show is, maybe it's not that popular.
But that history is interesting. Thanks for explaining