The Ratings / 3 Hour Raw situation

[Luten]

There's no doubt the current Raw format of being a 3 hour show is doing more harm than good.
Some people may disagree, but I believe they're in the minority. The latest ratings prove it.
I won't go in to details, most of the grievances about 3 hour Raws have already been expressed all over the forum.
My question today is will wwe ever go back to a 2 hour Raw?
With the recent draft they had a gift wrapped opportunity to do so without it seeming like they were back pedalling.
I understand the financial reasons they choose to have 3 hours every week, through the extra revenue they get with advertising etc but is it really worth it?
Why not have 3 hour Raws once a month instead for example?
PPVs don't feel as special when we have a 3 hour show every week. And at the moment we're getting PPVs every 2 weeks.
Everyone I speak to agrees it is just a draining viewing experience and that Smackdown flows much more nicely and is thus a more enjoyable show.
'Less is more' and 'always leave them wanting more' are concepts that wwe have totally lost sight of in the past few years. Raw almost always used to end on a cliff hanger every week aswell.
So, are we stuck with 3 hours of Raw every week? Or do you see wwe ever changing their minds?
Please refrain from the knee jerk reactions of 'You don't have to watch' and 'there are other wrestling companies' etc

I hope they will one day return to the 2 hour format and I truly think dedicated fans will thank them for it, and casual fans might not even notice. wwe would have nothing to worry about by making this move. They would just need to cut their loses from advertising, which I'm pretty sure they can afford to do.
Maybe its pressure from the USA Network? But surely they'd prefer a 2 hour show of good ratings on a weekly basis, instead of inconsistent, unpredictable ratings for a 3 hour show which as of late have been at there worst since 1996

 

[ShinChan]

It seems to us that bringing it back to 2 hours would be good for our watching experience. Whereas WWE wants to keep it 3 hours to make boatload of money from advertising and others.

The intermediate solution could be making it 2.5 hours. A half hour extra as compared to Smackdown just because it has an extra division to deal with i.e Cruiserweight.

I guess that could make things less filler. Plus, Noone wants to see Darren Young become great again when he wasn't great ever at all or some Titus brand.

Smackdown took less time and made Heath Slater relevant enough. But Raw failed at elevating a low card guy.

I still don't get why WWE would release talented guys like Sandow, Rhodes, Barrett and others and give exposure to Darren Young, Titus etc?

 

[Dagger Dias]

If WWE insists on having Raw remain 3 hours, then that's fine.... It's how they utilize the timeframe available for their content that matters. Smackdown's creative team does a great job with what they have available in building on every tier of the card weekly. Raw somehow fails with a larger roster and more time, to do the same. And it's supposed to be the flagship brand. Now if they want to keep things mostly how they have been with Raw focusing on promos and story progression while Smackdown focuses more on in-ring quality, we as fans are used to this and there is nothing wrong with that. Raw's team should should still take notes on what Smackdown has been doing. That extra hour could be going to to the Cruiserweights, if anything. We don't need a million recaps and even though I'm a promo guy, even I think some of the promos drag on sometimes. They need a better structure to their shows. The 3 hours is not the problem. The show format is. if they returned to 2 hours without revising the show structure, it would not resolve their issues. I enjoy it despite the length.... yet, there is room for improvement.

 

[Azane]

Ive been watching hour 2+3 and not 1, 1 is usually a 20-30 minute speech, and maybe 1 undercard match.

The speech will be replayed literally 6-7 times in hour 2+3, so without even seeing it live, Im usually sick of it by the end of the show.

I havent missed too much like this, and it has brought my enjoyment up.

Smackdown of course, is way more fun to watch, because I don't miss that, and I even watch Talking Smack after, making it almost 2 and a half hours, but it's way more quality stuffed in than RAW's over done promos, and the extra 3 squash matches that nobody cares about.

 

[Vanilla Midget]

The Op's perception that the length of Raw affects the quality of the program is a false take on the show. Yes, Smackdown is better at two hours but the length is far from the reason.

If Raw was five hours long and every minute of programming left you feeling the way you did when you watched pro-wrestling during the Monday night war then we'd be having a conversation about Raw not being long enough.

We also really need to stop having the conversation about TV ratings. I guarantee over half the IWC is taking in WWE via streaming sites like watch wrestling. Those people watching live are still being exposed to ads. This still makes the WWE model profitable. It's a tough conversation for a company to have about illegal streaming, but it's something you have to start taking into factor.

We also live in the DVR world. I record Raw, Smackdown and Impact every week and watch them later. I skip the commercials and the trash segments (looking at you Susan G. Komen) and usually wind up watch Raw in less than two hours anyway.

If Raw was incredible, I'd watch the whole thing. A shorter television program seems like a easy fix, but it's not. Smackdown has been two hours the whole time and was basically a piss break and a Raw recap until the new brand extention.

Two hour Raw does not adress any of the core issues. People are engaging with the product in new ways that don't get calculated in ratings. If Raw was as good as Smackdown is right now, this would be a "man Raw got good thread." Raw is not good because there's nothing challenging them to be good. Chopping off an hour just means Titus O'Neil works Superstars and Braun's squash match takes one minute instead of two.

 

[Rayne]

Here is the basic formula at work here, which has not changed in all the years we've been doing the 'omg 3 hours' thread.

The WWE wants to sell you as much content as they possibly can. The more that they are on television, the more they receive in fees from their television partners.

Their television partners, in turn, will provide as much WWE programming as they can so long as they don't think something else would attract more viewers in those particular hours.

So if enough people are watching- and they are, while the WWE's ratings are down, their share is not (which reflects the fact that less people are watching television on a television screen these days), they are going to continue to sell you three hours of wrestling on Mondays, two hours on Tuesdays, and if they think it's worth the purchase price for the viewers, you'll see even more.

The interests of all the parties involved in making money from this venture practically guarantee that you will never see a tightly scripted, action packed WWE program from start to finish. So long as people are willing to sit through it, they'll sell it.

 

[Sexcellence of Sexecution]

It is just about impossible to keep a viewer engaged in a television show for three hours. Especially given all the other choices on TV today. Three hour Raws lead to matces beng drawn out, the same matches being repeated over and over, gimmicks getting killed from overexposure, and stories feeling stagnant because of filler. Three hour shows are absolutely terrible.

However, there are more factors at play here than just the WWE. The network also has a say in these kinds of decisions, as television time is something that is negotiated between the WWE and the TV network. Yes, Raw ratings are down, but when considering whether or not to cut the third hour the question for the network becomes: is the programming we put on to replace the third hour going to draw anywhere near as much?

This is where the decision becomes complicated from a business perspective. Even if dropping the third hour of Raw leads to a ratings increase (and therefore increased advertising revenue) for the first two hours, does this increase off-set the potential decrease in ratings that will occur during that third hour timeslot. It's a difficult question to answer, and it will also depend on what other programming the network has available to fill the timeslot. The WWE also has to weigh the same question, although they have the added consideration of the damage being done to their brand by consistently putting on long, boring shows. Raw is no longer the exciting, must-watch weekly TV it used to be, and the three hour format certainly isn't helping that. The short term gains in ad revenue by ****ing out that third hour could eventually do long term damage to the branding of Monday Night Raw.

From a fan perspective the answer is still clear though, a three hour weekly wrestling show is the fucking worst.

 

[agentmichaelscarn]

It's not the length of it that is the problem. The problem is that it is just boring. It was a step in the right direction with Sasha winning the title a couple weeks ago, and Owens winning it like a month ago. But aside from that nothing ever happens on Raw.

Back in the day, you had to watch it because if you didn't you might miss a major title change, face/heel turn or a major storyline development. Now it's not like that. Every episode when they were at their peak ended on a cliff hanger, not just RAW but Nitro too. It truly was a "Male Soap Opera", it was like a serialized drama that made you have to tune in.

Now it's not like that. Virtually every title change happens on a PPV, no turns ever happen on a Raw, and the extent of storylines consist of mixed tag matches to kill time till the blow off at the PPV. On top of that every episode ends with a clear finish, there is never a question mark to end the episode. Back in Nitro's heyday every episode ended with SChiavone screaming "We're out of time, tune into next week to see what happens" as chaos pursued. It's not like that now. There are no cliff hangers. It's just boring matches that we see time and time again.

We know that nothing major is going to happen till the PPVs and if we tune out through Raw we're not missing anything. It would be like Walking Dead saying "Don't worry you only have to tune in at the mid season finale and season finale to know what is going on, nothing is going to happen in the other episodes." That's basically what Raw is like. We know that the PPVs are where it's at and Raw is just filler. There is really no reason to watch it because you know you won't miss out on anything major.

 

[rmp0012002]

Since we all agree that the third hour is to bring in ad revenue one issue is why movies aren't three hours long. People's attention span drops off and if you constantly add filler to most of your show then of course people watch less. At least in the old days they gave you just enough on a show that you had to turn in the next week to see what happened. I also think it takes too much to book a quality show every week with that amount of time.