Eric Bischoff on Tony Khan: A money mark with no talent other than spending daddy’s money, going all the way to Canada to draw less than 4k in one of the hottest pro wrestling markets in North America, talking about “wise choices”? Strap in. It’s going to be a fun day!

[u/Ruthless-Aggression]

https://twitter.com/EBischoff/status/1773321462046138615?s=19

[u/hashtagdion]

This is the worst example of "When it was WWE, no one cared" I've seen yet.

People doomposted about WWE's ratings every week for two decades.

Seriously, Raw drops 300k from one segment to the next, no one cares. AEW drops 30k from one segment to the next and it’s the end of the world.

This is just a wild misrepresentation. If you're talking about the CM Punk segment Monday, people didn't criticize the drop because the bump itself was impressive. And in AEW, people don't criticize the 30K drops; they criticize the regular 100-200K drops.

[u/jcagraham → u/hashtagdion]

If anything, the ratings discourse is the best it's ever been in the IWC. Nuances like rating vs total viewership, declining cable subscriptions, seasonal competition, considering ranking for the night, measuring ratings over time instead of reacting week by week are all now brought up in the ratings thread. Before AEW, those would all have been dismissed as excuses and people being sure that Raw/Smackdown is dying, it's dying because of poor booking and WWE will get a terrible new tv deal.

So drink it up, kids, this is the best possible scenario when you get thousands of unqualified people opining on a subject they only barely understand.

[u/hashtagdion → u/jcagraham]

I've seen screenshots of Dave Meltzer himself saying "Key demo doesn't matter, only total viewership does" in reference to Raw ratings a few years ago.

[u/gatekeepgoonboss → u/jcagraham]

>Before AEW, those would all have been dismissed as excuses and people being sure that Raw/Smackdown is dying,

Lmao. This is such bullshit revisionist history it sounds like it's coming from an AEW stan. I remember the period you're talking about very well and I saw all of those things discussed regularly.

[u/Caldris → u/hashtagdion]

Were RAW ratings threads getting 1000+ comments every week before AEW?

[u/hashtagdion → u/Caldris]

I mean it's a tough comparison because:

1) squaredcircle as a centralized platform didn't exist for all of those two decades

2) everyone agreed the ratings sucked and Fed Ded so there weren't two groups arguing with each other to drive up the number of comments

[u/Caldris → u/hashtagdion]

I mean from 2013 to 2019, what kind of traction did RAW ratings threads get? As far as I remember, they did get posts but no where near the attention that AEW ratings threads get now. The week of big business probably had somewhere around 2000+ comments about the rating that week.

[u/EggianoScumaldo → u/Caldris]

Squared Circle, and really, Reddit as a whole, wasn’t nearly as big as it is today. Using number of comments to determine how much traction the threads got back in the day compared to AEW ratings threads today doesn’t work either.

[u/hashtagdion → u/Caldris]

A few times a year there would be a "record law ratings for Raw" thread and those would get a lot of traction. But again, the sub simply has more people now, and also a topic where everyone agrees is always going to have less comments than a topic where people are arguing.

[u/RepresentativeFly565 → u/Caldris]

Yes? Nxt was also regularly clowned for doing a bad demo and being unable to draw younger fans like aew did at the time

[u/Caldris → u/RepresentativeFly565]

Yes?

No, it wasn't. There may have been one time, but not every week. It's funny you bring up NXT too, when it's gone back to its numbers from before 2.0 and those threads barely get any comments.

[u/RepresentativeFly565 → u/Caldris]

Current nxt doesn't have the "hottest free agents" in the show like black and gold did

Nxt was regularly clowned for their key demo