Tony Khan isn’t sure whether ratings are taken too seriously in wrestling or not.
Ratings in wrestling, particularly when they’re regarding WWE and AEW, are a metric of how successful the companies products are. With AEW Dynamite coming in at around 900,000 every week and RAW and SmackDown bringing in around 2 million a week, any fluctuations are jumped on by fans either way.
Now in an interview with DAZN, AEW President Tony Khan was asked if people make too big of a deal about ratings in pro wrestling.
I don’t know. I think it’s important. It seems like a metric that wrestling fans have followed for decades to track promotion success. It didn’t really become a thing that was widely publicized and disseminated not just among wrestling fans but even by media covering wrestling. There’s been a lot more interest in it since the Monday Night Wars of the ’90s. It’s a metric that stuck with us, and people have used to track the success of promotions. I think the ranking is what’s emblematic of what’s happening in TV at that time and place. In the current cable and satellite universe, there’s a ton of money in rights fees. It’s brought a lot of interest to the pro wrestling business, and I’ve been able to leverage it into building a pretty big business over the last few years.
Our competition, WWE, has done a great job building their TV business and generating huge revenues through multiple TV properties. No company besides them has ever generated hundreds of millions of dollars through TV and pay-per-view, as we have done in our relationship with Warner Brothers Discovery and the pay-per-view business we built for AEW. AEW is doing something special, and it’s only possible because of the wrestling fans around the world who’ve supported the business over the last few years.
Tony Khan to DAZN
Time will tell how important ratings will continue to be in the wrestling industry but Tony considers it to be as important as ever in today’s times.
H/T to DAZN for transcription
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