El Torito vs. Hornswoggle. Yep.
Alexander Rusev vs. R-Truth and Xavier Woods. The winner in this is obvious. At least the WWE did a little to make Truth and Woods look credible against Rusev recently.
Paige vs. Tamina. Once again, the winner seems obvious. No need to end Paige's reign here. I have been talking about feuds that should last beyond Extreme Rules in the last few days.This is not one of those feuds. The WWE has not developed a great feud here and I don't even want to see them try. It will be painful. Just move Paige onto something better.
Big E vs. Bad News Barrett. If any title is likely to change hands at this event, it has to be the Intercontinental Championship. Big E has held it for months. He has been pushed pretty mediocrely for the majority of that time. Not surprising at all. On the other side of that, you have Wade Barrett, who has been rejuvenated with this gimmick. Bad News Barrett is great. He has a ton of momentum on his side. He can be a great thing for the midcard.
Cesaro vs. Rob Van Dam vs. Jack Swagger. The likely match you could have had for Extreme Rules would have been between just Cesaro and his former partner, Jack Swagger. You had Heyman and Zeb to add a little spice to things. The WWE took it one big step further. They inserted Rob Van Dam. And I think they did a pretty good job of inserting him into the mix. The story is there. I usually do not like triple-threat matches where nothing is on the line, but I'll let this one go. Cesaro should win. He is the one they seem most interested in pushing in this match.
I came across an article in the last week about a topic I have brought up a lot in the last few months. It can be found here. A lot of points to bring up.
First of all, reading the article, I realized I did not properly account for international buys when I was determining what kind of benchmark you should want to have for Wrestlemania XXX. I admit it, I botched. All it really means is I should have kept the benchmark higher. Like 800,000 total PPV buys. For the millionth time, the reason is that you would want to have high standards for a Wrestlemania that should have been treated as something special.
The article mentions that expectations were at 295,000 domestic buys. That is low. I understand you have the WWE Network, it does not include international buys, and all that, but I would have expected at least 400,000, which is around the number they ended up getting. Of course, the WWE really did not create a stellar PPV card featuring legends and celebrities that generated a ton of hype. Hulk Hogan returned, but they did not do anything exciting with him. When The Rock came back, they started developing a feud between him and John Cena. This Wrestlemania season did not measure up to what you had in the last three years. That is probably the reason expectations were so low. Poor build leads to low expectations. That is underachieving.
The writer of that article said one thing I found very interesting:
Buying a PPV the old-fashioned way instead of subscribing to the network makes no sense for even casual WWE fans. One PPV costs roughly $60 -- the same price as six months of the network, which gives you access to six PPVs, around 1,300 hours of archived WWE content, and tons of exclusive programming.
It makes no sense? Really? I don't think a lot of people understand casual fans. Fans do not come in just one flavor. Let me break it down into 3 groups. You have your casual fans, regular fans, and hardcore fans. Hardcore fans are really into whatever it is they love that much. You ever see people get tattoos of their favorite sports team or get it shaved into their head? That's hardcore. Regular fans support whatever it is on a regular basis, including spending money on it now and then. Casual fans are the ones that care about it, but really are not that into it.
Why would fans that are not that into it subscribe to the WWE Network? The archived content? Tons of exclusive programming? They can live without it. And that would be why they are CASUAL fans. They just want to pay for what they want. As I have said before, drawing in the casual fans is why Wrestlemania is the most successful WWE PPV pretty much every year. These fans don't care that much about seeing the five other PPVs included in the 6-month commitment. That is why all those other PPVs would get lesser buys. It really isn't shocking at all that the number of subscribers for the WWE Network fell short of initial expectations, while the number of PPV buys for Wrestlemania exceeded expectations. The number of subscribers exceeded my expectations, but I was expecting a lot of PPV buyers. And just for the sake of repeating myself, I still feel the WWE could have done better and should have tried to do better.
Let me get to the main point of that article. PPV providers are dropping the WWE. You might have noticed how the commentators handled things on Raw. Satellite providers are not offering Extreme Rules. I have Dish Network. I had DirecTV before that. I have not subscribed to the WWE Network. I am not going to. Well, looks like I'm screwed. That is, if I am ever interested in watching another WWE PPV. Right now, I can live without it. They have gotten pretty pricey.
This is not how the WWE would have liked things to work out. They are losing money. Fans are essentially paying just $9.99 to watch these PPVs that would normally cost more than triple that. The WWE only gets about half that, while the other half goes to the PPV providers, but that's still more than $9.99. The WWE has not even gotten enough subscribers to break even yet. And what happens when 6 months are up and people start dropping it? Will the flow of new subscribers offset the drop? They will most likely have to raise the price of their network. If the WWE makes roughly half of what a PPV costs for themselves, it would make sense to charge a little bit more than roughly half of what the average PPV would cost. Make your money for the PPVs and for the other content. You cannot count on PPV revenue when those providers start dropping you.
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