During an appearance on the MackMania podcast, Eric Bischoff talked about his public criticism of the AEW product:
“I have been beating this drum, and this is one of the reasons why Tony [Khan] probably thinks I am a pain in his ass at this point. I’ll never get invited to another AEW event, which is okay. I am a little sad about that, but I get it, I don’t take it personally,” he said. “But I’ve been saying for over a year now when it comes to AEW. And this is why I am concerned about their dirt sheet booking approach, booking for the internet if you will. Is that if you’re not growing, you’re dying.”
Bischoff went into more details:
“Here’s where Tony’s at right now, he’s got a year and a half, two years left on his existing agreement with Turner. There is a new company coming to town, there is a new sheriff in town, his name is David Zaslav. He works for a company called Discovery,” Eric said. “They now own all the Turner properties. Well, if you come in, and you acquire one property in television, and you look at that programming schedule, and you look at the revenue that’s generated by it because this is all about making money. My first question is going to be, ‘OK, we’ve got this beachfront, also called primetime. We’ve got this beachfront property here on Wednesday nights, how is that doing?’ Well, the audience isn’t growing, ‘OK, well, they’re young, we’ll give it some time.’
Let’s look at it a different way, ‘are they improving upon their lead-in?’ Because that’s another formula that’s very important when you’re a programmer. Not when you’re a wrestling fan, but when you’re a programmer and you’re a $350- or $550,000-a-year salary, your stock options are dependent on how well you manage that beachfront property. So, if you’re looking at that beachfront property, and the audience isn’t really growing, and they don’t really outperform their lead-in, okay, two strikes. ‘Hey, who’s here from ad sales? OK, Mr. or Mrs. ad salesperson, how are the ad sales going for this product? Are you getting premium ad dollars for it? Are you getting mid-tier advertising for it? Or are you kind of getting bottom feeder opportunistic ad buys?’ Because, for the most part, wrestling is still a little bit of a tough sell. If the answer comes back, ‘Well, we are kind of just plugging along, we are getting some action in the ad sales, but it’s a lower tier, opportunistic kind of buys. And the audience isn’t really growing, and we are not really outperforming our lead-in,’ those are kind of three things that are really working against you when somebody comes in and decides whether they want to redevelop that beachfront property to be more profitable, or if they want to leave it the same. And that’s why I saw growing is so important.”
