During his recent podcast, Eric Bischoff discussed the Coronavirus and its impact on the wrestling business. Here are some highlights:
On what he would do regarding WWE and AEW TV ratings falling as they continue to run shows without a crowd: “I think if I was running something right now and was faced with the situation that we’re in right now, I would advocate, I don’t know if anybody would buy it or not, but I would advocate pulling the stuff off the air. Now I know WWE can’t do that. They have a massive television contract with FOX and USA. Again, I don’t know what AEW’s relationship is with TNT. But if it were possible, without any risk of losing said contract in the future, to just take it off the air because unfortunately the situation that we’re seeing now, WWE is continuing to put content out and we continue to see the audience deteriorate week after week after week.”
On how AEW and NXT viewership numbers right now are ‘frightening’: “I think AEW was around 653,000 viewers, let that sink in just a minute. Half a million viewers across the country, a population of 330 million people, in the United States who are locked in their homes and AEW was able to, whatever the number was, 650,000 and NXT might have been 652,000. That’s frightening. That means the people that were watching AEW when they were kind of living in that 700,000 to 900,000 viewer category. NXT was probably 10-15% below that on average, and head-to-head probably 20% below whatever the numbers were. A good chunk, 25-30% of that audience, has said, ‘Eh, I don’t want to watch this stuff anymore.’ And they have made that emotional decision to seek their entertainment elsewhere. We gotta get them back. How do you get them back? What are you going to do? Especially in the case of AEW which really only launched eight months ago, six months ago, however long ago it was, they still have the new car smell, right? And now they’re gonna be faced with, ‘Oh my God, we got to rebuild this audience.’ How do you do that when you’re still new? NXT, same thing, they’ve been struggling, they’ve had a hard time competing with AEW.”
