Thats not really a fair comparison though. When WWWF was seven years old, or seven years after McMahon Jr. took over wrestling had a very different profile.
You cannot compare TNA's failure now to the WWWF's success back then.
That was a different time, different era, and profesional wrestling was a different sport. Back then, technology was different, the sport was different, and there wasn't even a television in every household in America. Now there's an average of
two televisions in every home. And presently, the product is about creating a
television show with storylines and drama instead of just plain old wrestling matches.
The problem here is that TNA's writing team absolutely sucks the big, fat one. There is no reason to watch their programming. It's just a cheesy, watered down version of wrestling programming that we've already witnessed during the attitude era.
Seven thousand buys isn't too bad though, paticularly when I imagine that most TNA fans are smarks. They don't have the same level of exposure as WWE where Joe Public can just stumble across them. Yes they are there, but they're only there 2/6 of the time WWE are (iMpact vs. Raw + SD + ECW + Superstars, even SNME sometimes).
This is not a good excuse, in my opinion. Naturally, the WWE is able to spread themselves throughout the market more efficiently. But back in the early 80's, the WWF was running Prime Time Wrestling, Superstars of Wrestling, and All-American Wrestling during the week. TNA only puts on one television show per week, but they replay it 3-4 times during the week. Furthermore, they broadcast it on Spike TV, a national network suited for men's viewing. They have plenty of opportunity for exposure. Their problems are:
Their product sucks.
Their writers sucks.
Their arena sucks.
Their storylines are atrocious.
Having the same audience members that don't give two shits about the product attending their shows every week sucks.
And 2/6 = 1/3. But this isn't math class...
- To the average viewers, Raw, Smackdown, and ECW are only on once per week. The only way to catch their replays is to be a part of a household that utilizes HD programming, and then you could watch repays of Raw and ECW on Universal HD. But, we can't really count that towards the majority of the WWE's numbers.
- TNA has one television show (Impact) but it gets replayed twice per week. That's three shows, last time I counted.
If you combine the viewers from all three TNA shows throughout the week, it doesn't even exceed the numbers from ONE showing of ECW.
My point is that smarks are less likely to buy a PPV if they know what's going to happen.
What does this have to do with live PPV's? If TNA does its job correctly, the audience should be unable to determine the outcome of matches during the PPV's.
Besides, your statement is untrue. We all knew that Ric Flair was going to lose his match to HBK at Wrestlemania, yet we all tuned in. We're almost always convinced that the Undertaker won't lose at Wrestlemania, yet we all tuned in. It's not about whether we know the outcome or not. It's about if we give a shit.
Plus, they know they can watch it for free the next day on Youtube (not that I'm condoning that, it's generally a pretty bad thing, not just morally but for the business as it causes a loss of revenue, and less revenue means less investment in the product).
This is irrelevant. These days, we can find anything on YouTube, MetaCafe, or other sites in that category.
