Professional Wrestling Discussion

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>Smackdown

>205 Live

>Main Event

>Monday’s Raw drew an average of 2,534,000 viewers on USA Network, down from last week’s post-SummerSlam 2,729,000 viewers.

>Raw was #2, #3 and #4 on cable in the 18-49 demographic for the day, behind a pre-season Monday Night Football game between the 49ers and Broncos on ESPN, which drew 3,011,000 viewers.

>Raw averaged a 0.81 rating in the 18-49 demographic, meaning 0.81% of total people that age watched the show, down from last week’s 0.92 rating.

>This time last year, the August 20, 2018 Raw drew 3,095,000 viewers. The August 21, 2017 Raw drew 3,404,000 viewers.

>Hourly breakdown:

> The immediate reaction was that Shibata must be coming back for a match with KENTA. We’ve been told that the talent was told that wasn’t possible, that he was doing what he could do to get KENTA over as strongly as possible as a heel. The angle was one of the best in decades, with heat unseen in years. We’re told he’s not cleared to wrestle and that there is no information leading to the idea anything has changed from the 2017 diagnosis that he could never be cleared to wrestle again. But you never say never.

> SummerSlam had a different issue, with Endeavor’s Neulion taking over as the host server from Bam Tech, which WWE had used since its inception, the show was filled with widespread problems. Many people gave up on watching. Many reported multiple buffering. There were some problems with Takeover the night before, which was the new hosts first major live event. We had no problems during Takeover, but attempting to watch some of the Takeover matches a second time was very difficult with constant buffering. We had significant problems with the pre-show, as well as the main show. It was so bad that it felt to me that a lot of people who wanted to see the show would revert to PPV, but based on numbers, that didn’t happen to any significant degree.

> The show drew a legitimate sellout of more than 13,500, with an announced figure of 16,904. With the wrestling war going on, they brought back heaps of pyro. Preliminary numbers indicate 19,600 buys on PPV, which is down from 29,900 last year, a 34 percent decline even with the network issues and even with network subscribers being down probably around eight to nine percent from one year ago. Of those, roughly 436 bought the AEW show, so this audience for the most part didn’t sample that show, and actually more (606 or so) bought the Manny Pacquiao vs. Keith Thurman fight.

> An interesting note is that 72 percent of the buyers of this year’s show did not buy last year’s show, so that indicates two things. One is that a lot of fans that pick and choose skipped one or the other. With network numbers being down, it wouldn’t be that last year’s buyers became network subscribers, but more that a lot more people who bought last year have lost interest in the product, far more than expected. It’s not offset by new people interested, but there were 14,200 buyers this year who did not buy last year, and there were 24,500 who did buy last year who didn’t buy this year, or 82 percent of last year’s buyers didn’t repeat this year.

> There were, at press time, about 490 secondary market tickets with a $43 low price for Clash of Champions. That’s not bad because you can get tickets at the box office for $22.50, so the scalpers aren’t panicking even with plenty of lower priced tickets unsold.

> WWE quietly announced the cancellation of five house shows in August, all on the Raw side. This coincides with the report we had last week of doing more dual branded “Supershows” going forward. The shows canceled are the entire Raw house show tour in two weeks, with shows on 8/23 in Bossier City, LA, 8/24 in Lafayette, LA and 8/25 in Mobile, AL, as well as two of the three shows the following week, on 8/30 in Bangor, ME and 8/31 in Portland, ME. What’s notable is that out of nowhere, Kane was booked to work the Bossier City and Lafayette house shows.

> In the case of the first weekend, this is simply canceling shows likely due to bad advances. Even with the high ticket prices, it’s no longer the case that almost all house shows are profitable. But it’s one thing to cancel Monday Smackdown shows because so much of th…