Vegeance - Second Lowest PPV Buyrate Ever

[rge2010]

Comments like CM Punks last week about the Rock not being a factor in Survivor Series and Wrestlemania 27 PPV buys make him look a bit stupid now. He must have egg on his face...

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WWE's Vengeance pay-per-view event on October 23, 2011 garnered 130,000 buys overall—70,000 in North America and 60,000 overseas.

With the exception of the disastrous December to Dismember pay-per-view event in 2006, Vengeance is the lowest-selling domestic pay-per-view event in WWE history—dating back to the infancy of pay-per-view in the 1980s. December to Dismember, which was branded as an ECW event, drew 55,000 buys in North America.

Vengeance was headlined by Alberto Del Rio vs. John Cena in a Last Man Standing Match, Mark Henry vs. Big Show in a World Heavyweight Championship Match, and Awesome Truth vs. CM Punk and Triple H.

 

[ABMorales787]

Kind of a damn shame really. The card was actually pretty good. The ring collapsing may not be something new, but it was a highlight and the Last Man Standing match had a cool perspective due to not having a ring for the most part. It's obvious the problem is that clutter of PPV's that follow Summerslam. Too many,too close.

 

[klunderbunker]

Gee, one might begin to think that having another 50 dollar show where the main event means nothing, a Raw title match where no one on the planet thought Cena had a chance of losing, two weeks after another PPV that didn't seem to mean much might be a REALLY STUPID IDEA. I said for months that this was going to be a bad idea and now look at the results. There was never any reason to have this PPV and apparently I wasn't the only one to think this.

 

[Harthan]

Hopefully this is a wake-up call to the WWE that the way they're doing PPV is flawed, from a financial and a creative standpoint. This is, however, pretty unlikely. A PPV needs 5 weeks, minimum, to build anything worthwhile. Ideally, even more. Six weeks is preferably. Five weeks gives you 10 PPVs in the calendar year. Six gives you 8. Let's call 9 the happy medium, including extended buildup for Mania. By my count, the WWE will put on 13 in 2011. Taking out WrestleMania's 6 weeks, the other 12 PPVs will combine for 40 weeks of build, meaning an average of 3-4 weeks per PPV. This is abysmal. I'm pretty sure at least once this year a PPV ran with 2 weeks build - it might have been Vengeance. There are two problems with this - one, you just can't create a compelling narrative across the board in only two weeks, and two, if people just shelled out 50 bucks three weeks ago, they probably won't want to do it again.

The WWE needs to have fewer PPVs in a year, and it needs to start charging less. Run 9 PPVs a year with an average of 5-6 weeks of build, and charge 35 dollars for them. I would be willing to bet that that drives overall profit way up on these things. Make sure every main event actually means something, have less frequent title changes, etc., etc., etc., and people are more likely to buy a PPV.

 

[klunderbunker]

Hopefully this is a wake-up call to the WWE that the way they're doing PPV is flawed, from a financial and a creative standpoint. This is, however, pretty unlikely. A PPV needs 5 weeks, minimum, to build anything worthwhile. Ideally, even more. Six weeks is preferably. Five weeks gives you 10 PPVs in the calendar year. Six gives you 8. Let's call 9 the happy medium, including extended buildup for Mania. By my count, the WWE will put on 13 in 2011. Taking out WrestleMania's 6 weeks, the other 12 PPVs will combine for 40 weeks of build, meaning an average of 3-4 weeks per PPV. This is abysmal. I'm pretty sure at least once this year a PPV ran with 2 weeks build - it might have been Vengeance. There are two problems with this - one, you just can't create a compelling narrative across the board in only two weeks, and two, if people just shelled out 50 bucks three weeks ago, they probably won't want to do it again.

The WWE needs to have fewer PPVs in a year, and it needs to start charging less. Run 9 PPVs a year with an average of 5-6 weeks of build, and charge 35 dollars for them. I would be willing to bet that that drives overall profit way up on these things. Make sure every main event actually means something, have less frequent title changes, etc., etc., etc., and people are more likely to buy a PPV.

It's not so much about the amount of PPVs as it is the simple idea of there is no reason to watch Vengeance. The main event is a tag match. It's not for the titles, it's not for control of the company, it's not for anything but getting a win. Why would I want to pay 50 bucks when the results will be up for free on WWE.com five minutes after the show ends? HHH/Punk vs. Awesome Truth isn't something I'm going to go out of my way to buy. Neither is Del Rio vs. Cena in Cena's specialty or Big Show vs. Mark Henry. Couple that with it being two weeks after HIAC and they were set up to fail.

 

[Harthan]

It's not so much about the amount of PPVs as it is the simple idea of there is no reason to watch Vengeance. The main event is a tag match. It's not for the titles, it's not for control of the company, it's not for anything but getting a win. Why would I want to pay 50 bucks when the results will be up for free on WWE.com five minutes after the show ends? HHH/Punk vs. Awesome Truth isn't something I'm going to go out of my way to buy. Neither is Del Rio vs. Cena in Cena's specialty or Big Show vs. Mark Henry. Couple that with it being two weeks after HIAC and they were set up to fail.

Vengeance was a glorified episode of Raw, essentially. I agree entirely that a huge part of the problem is the fact that the WWE didn't book Vengeance well, and was a contributing factor to its general failure. Part of the problem, in my estimation at least, is how rapidly it occurred after HIAC and how little build there was. Suppose I bought HIAC - am I really going to shill out for another PPV in two weeks? It'd have to be WrestleMania quality to get me to do that. Even an above-average PPV would have suffered in that environment. The WWE is doing PPVs wrong across the board - the matches don't mean anything, the PPVs happen too frequently, nothing is built sufficiently - and all of the problems revealed themselves at Vengeance, which is why this was such a poorly selling PPV.

 

[Davi323]

4 PPVs a year. That is all they need to do. When PPVs are deemed "special", people will watch. We have become oversaturated with PPVs, its ridiculous. Get rid of every PPV other than Wrestlemania, Summer Slam, Survivor Series and the Royal Rumble. Keep the same concepts of the others, but make them special RAWs and Smackdowns, do more freebie Saturday Night's Main Event type stuff. Give yourselves 3 months to establish storylines, which makes PPVs important events, and people will go back to watching. Who actually orders all 13 PPVs? I can only afford to buy so many at 50 bucks a pop, so I pick and choose. If the WWE eliminated all but the 4 big ones, you can guarandamntee that I order all 4. When you put together a crap card like Vengeance had, it's not really surprising it did so poorly.

 

[King of the Words]

There's 12 months and I believe 13 WWE PPV's a year. And that pack from Night of Champs to Vengence is just too much, and too close together. It is obviously a money grab, because feuds can't develop enough in a couple weeks to have a decent PPV. Vince must think we are a bunch of morons who will buy anything and everything he craps out. Like someone said earlier, I hope this is a wake up call to the WWE to stop trying to rip off their fans every month, and sometimes twice a month. If it were up to me I would say less is more. Have like six PPV's a year to give time to build up story lines and feuds that are worth paying to watch. I would have The Royal Rumble as it is. Then Mania in mid March. King of the Ring returning in late may or early June. Summer Slam in late August. MITB PPV. in early October, and the Survivor series in late November. Get rid of most themed PPV's besides MITB and King of the Ring. Have TLC matches added to MITB . Have Elimination Chamber matches put in the Survivor series. Have Extreme Rules matches where ever needed. There is a lot of different ways to mix it up every year and surprise us a bit. Having it this way would give more time to build feuds properly and get people more interested in the product. If done correctly, less could mean more, in the long run.

 

[Shocky]

Hopefully this is the shot that the WWE needs to wake up. Of course it's not going to be a WWE problem, it'll be a certain wrestler can't draw problem, or the crowd doesn't get it problem. It's not a, boy oh boy, we're in a recession and maybe charging people 50 bucks 15 times a year isn't a good idea, problem.

The time for 12 pay per views is done. There isn't competition to demand that much wrestling each and every month. The product is over exposed, time to tone it down.

I've been saying for years, go back to 6 - 10 pay per views a year. Allow for feuds to play out and make it so people want to order the show. Or, go back to the IYH concept. Cheaper price for non Big 4 pay per views. I know the WWE hates to acknowledge the existence of the Big 4 in the minds of its fans, but that's how we see them. If you charge half price for lesser pay per views, people will watch.

 

[SmarksAreIgnorant]

I like how the way people think they can counter bad ppv numbers is to have the Rock return. We want a big number, lets get the Rock. What a great long term business plan ain't it? How about we cut down the number of ppvs, the price and have matches that MEAN something. CM Punk's comments are 100% justified, that is all.

 

[Jack-Hammer]

I think it's a combination of the sheer number of ppvs and the general feeling that Vengeance simply didn't come across as a "must see" show. I enjoyed the ppv overall. It wasn't a classic show but it certainly wasn't bad either.

At the same time, however, there just really wasn't a lot on the show for a long of average fans to sink their teeth into. The main event, while fun, was ultimately a tag match that shouldn't have closed the show. Cena vs. Del Rio would end with Cena either willing or losing due to tons of interference because, God forbid that John Cena actually lose a match. Henry vs. Show was a good match in my view but, let's face it, nobody really expected Show to win the title that night from Henry.

The easiest option would be to reduce the number of ppvs. As a result, the WWE would have to really, really focus on what they think will work, how it should be booked and who should get certain spots if they don't want the show to bomb. At the same time though, while Vengeance did draw 130,000 buys worldwide, that's still almost $6 million bucks so. Not record breaking by any stretch but they certainly didn't lose money.

WWE will never go back to the 4 ppvs a year format. There's simply too much money at risk when it all boils down to it. Having such a low number of shows might work out and, then again, it might not. It'd be easy for me to say that if they went back to a much smaller number of ppvs a year, really having a lot of time to devote to the build of each show that the buys for the shows would be much higher. Fact of the matter is, however, I don't know that there'd be more buys. So far in 2011, including Vengeance and HIAC, WWE has sold in the range of 3.2-3.3 million ppv buys in total. All of the 13 WWE ppvs cost $44.95, with the exception of WrestleMania at $54.95, which gives the overall average ppv price at about $45.72. With that price, thus far, WWE ppvs have made somewhere in the vicinity of $146,304,000 to $150,876,000. Any way you slice it, that's a shitload of money. Reducing it back to a big 4 scenario means that, in order to equal this amount with 13 ppvs, each of the big 4 would have to generate somewhere close to 1,000,000 ppv buys each and there's no guarantee that it'd happen.

I do agree that WWE should rethink their approach to ppvs. I don't think it'd hurt to cut back on the number to some degree, but reducing them by 75% probably isn't a realistic idea.

 

[¡Roján!]

Hopefully, this is a huge wakeup call for big Vinnie and all the yes-men up in Stanford to calm the fuck down. Paying $150 in 5 weeks in this current economic climate for a tedious card with no real build-up for the story lines and feuds is ludicrous. I mean, who gave a fuck about Delberto and Cena slugging it out in a last man standing match? I, for one, had more interest in the Hunico vs Sin Cara debacle, and that's saying something. But, it doesn't matter how good the matches are, there's simply no need to buy the PPV's, and that's where the problem lies. You, the loyal viewer ends up paying $5 to watch a crumby divas match-up. The PPV need to have more bang for their buck. Easy. Whether that be reducing the number of PPVs to 8 (4 is far to low) or making them cheaper or simply, you know, trying to make a good storyline (ala MITB) then, I'm all good. At the end of the day, when Dwayne ends up running back to Hollywood, the WWE is screwed. Well, not screwed. They'll still be making money, but, nothing like what they should. Interest in wrestling is ever dwindling and with restraints like these, it's not completely blasphemy. Shit needs to change. Rapido.

 

[shattered dreams]

I doubt Vince really cares. I can't speak to the surrounding circumstances for the event but if you guys are right and there was no reason to buy this PPV it still did 130,000 buys. An extra week or two worth of build isn't going to generate that many additional buys for a combined show. Creatively I certainly agree that there are too many PPVs and in the long-term you run the risk of diluting the PPV until it completely falls apart. However, that isn't going to happen any time soon. If you go to less shows then you have to make that money up somewhere and no one seems to have any ideas for that part. Until they do there is no reason to change which is why no company has. If anything all this will do is produce more shows not less and from a business sense that would seem to be the correct approach.

 

[Jeremy5144]

I looked at this and the first thing I thought was to bundle each with a big Pay Per View or they could do maybe a 3 or 6 month deal or even going a full year of pay-per-view at one solid price.

For example if they did what the other major sports do which would be like a full season pass. They could call it WWE Season Pass where for one flat price you could get all the WWE Pay-Per-Views for the year and they could cut the price by 10 bucks or 20 bucks although they'd lose money on a single PPV they could gain it by getting somebody to get all the pay-per-view all year this could solve their issue with buy-rates during the year. They could even add like a club that some of the other sports do offering extra incentives on getting this pass it would be better than cutting back on the amount of PPVs.

 

[bk555]

makes sense but in reality the card had some good matches, the build was just too weak and was also 2 weeks long. WWE should have seen this coming

 

[JerichoHolic00]

Wow, I Thought the card was pretty good.
I think they should do 6 PPVs a year. Royal Rumble, Wrestlemania, Money In The Bank, Summerslam, Night Of Champions, Survivor Series. If they done this then when the PPVs do come around there's going to be much more compelling story lines and they would mean a lot more, so hopefully the matches would be better.

 

[Lionshare]

Remember that it was cena / del rio the match that closed the ppv, but in the end it was just a filler ppv, to wait for the rock comeback.

 

[Defekt]

It's not CM Punk's fault. This was a filler PPV that wasn't worth paying for. I assumed the buyrate would be low. I follow the WWE very closely, and didn't even bother checking the results until after Raw started.

Cena vs Del Rio wasn't much of a feud. They kept swapping the belt, but really didn't have a good storyline. Cena was mostly focused on the CM Punk/HHH/Awesome Truth drama.

Mark Henry vs Big Show was nothing to get excited about, as Henry had already beat Randy Orton, there was no chance Big Show would beat him.

HHH/CM Punk vs Miz/R-Truth was ok, but more the type of match up you'd expect on RAW. Tag team matches aren't that big a draw anymore I guess, unless it's the Rock competing.

The rest of the card was decent, but not worth blowing $50 on in my opinion. It may have been a good event (I haven't seen it), but the build and card weren't strong enough to warrant a purchase.

 

[kokoBawesome]

So after Wrestlemania, when the PPV buy rates drop again and the Rock is gone.... do you think they're going to put on better shows to get more fans, or just put on 14 PPVs so they can make up for that lost revenue by milking the loyal buyers?

Not trying to change the question, just saying that If this continues we're all going to get screwed. Vince is a business man, not a promoter. Hes going to make his money any way he can. Sad news.

At this point who really gives a shit is C.M. Punk is right or wrong? When the fairweather fans are gone its going to feel like 2007 around the WWE.

 

[a7xfan93]

i wonder why these ppv's are getting the lowest buy rates? could it be no build up or story line? could it be there are too many? could it be no excitement? "alberto del rio, in one week you will defend your championship against this man....." *que john cena's entrance*?

nah, it's not that...couldn't be..

 

[Vega]

I think it's more of a creative problem. There are few big moments and a lot of promising things get hotshotted or peter out. Money In The Bank with Punk's storyline was the last big moment I can think of, preceded by the return of Rock (who didn't do anything worthwhile at Mania and the show was more or less built around him) and... I don't know... the Nexus invasion before it became about Cena overcoming the odds again? I may be missing something.

There are so many reports about RAW getting rewritten at the last minute and entire segments and angles getting new directions or entirely cancelled. There is no visible approach to look further than one or two months into the future and plan things ahead, and it shows badly. But how can you expect writers to create something compelling in such an environment? Feuds and characters are more of a constant blur than ever, I think.

The amount of PPVs is another problem, of course. There are so many and they're so poorly timed that Creative isn't even really there to develop storylines and characters, but merely to fill PPVs, on and on. Two weeks between PPVs? Of course there won't be anything compelling.
On the other hand, the number of PPVs won't be reduced, because I'm sure it pays out, at least in the short run. It will also create a stealthy apathy towards the product, but can you really expect long-term thinking from a company that (re)writes their main angles and shows just minutes before they play out?

I don't even think it's absolutely necessary to cut down the number of PPVs, but the timing is just bad. There are 52 weeks a year, with 13 PPVs and strict scheduling you can have one every four weeks. That's eight TV shows (at least 16 hours), enough time to promote PPVs if you do it clever and plan ahead. Let's say there are 12 hours of TV time (advertising substracted) and eight matches per PPV card, that's one and a half hours to promote a match, mostly more. You could create a lot in that time. That being said, you'd still have to cut pointless crap and plan ahead, and that seems to be the main problem here.

 

[Rckstrtmmy]

Haha I LOVE how people with no business sense complain about too many PPVs. The storylines and wrestlers come second in WWE. Everyone knows it's all about profit! 130,000 buys might be low but they still made over 5 MILLION dollars from the PPV buys alone! Add sponsorship deals and the gate etc. and the WWE made enough from that show despite crappy, rehashed matches that we saw like 2 weeks before Vengeance at Night of Champions. I don't like the PPV's jammed all close together any more than anybody else but as long as the WWE is making money off them, they are gonna keep churning them out.

 

[Rampage Bentley]

Haha I LOVE how people with no business sense complain about too many PPVs. The storylines and wrestlers come second in WWE. Everyone knows it's all about profit! 130,000 buys might be low but they still made over 5 MILLION dollars from the PPV buys alone! Add sponsorship deals and the gate etc. and the WWE made enough from that show despite crappy, rehashed matches that we saw like 2 weeks before Vengeance at Night of Champions. I don't like the PPV's jammed all close together any more than anybody else but as long as the WWE is making money off them, they are gonna keep churning them out.

I don't think you need a lot of business sense to know you're not going to waste your money on something... and when mass quantities of people make the same decision, it kinda adds up.

Sure, they pulled in 5 mill... but did you know, Mr. Businesssense, that there's such a thing as overhead costs? For example, holding a show in an arena is not free. Believe it or not, they get a cut of the money that the PPV rakes in. Thought all your favorite WWE superstars were working Pro Bono? SPOILER ALERT they don't. You also have to shell out money for the slot on PPV, for security, vendors, pyro etc etc. 5 million dollars doesn't go quite as far as you think it does.

 

[d_henderson1810]

I think it's a combination of the sheer number of ppvs and the general feeling that Vengeance simply didn't come across as a "must see" show. I enjoyed the ppv overall. It wasn't a classic show but it certainly wasn't bad either.

At the same time, however, there just really wasn't a lot on the show for a long of average fans to sink their teeth into. The main event, while fun, was ultimately a tag match that shouldn't have closed the show. Cena vs. Del Rio would end with Cena either willing or losing due to tons of interference because, God forbid that John Cena actually lose a match. Henry vs. Show was a good match in my view but, let's face it, nobody really expected Show to win the title that night from Henry.

The easiest option would be to reduce the number of ppvs. As a result, the WWE would have to really, really focus on what they think will work, how it should be booked and who should get certain spots if they don't want the show to bomb. At the same time though, while Vengeance did draw 130,000 buys worldwide, that's still almost $6 million bucks so. Not record breaking by any stretch but they certainly didn't lose money.

WWE will never go back to the 4 ppvs a year format. There's simply too much money at risk when it all boils down to it. Having such a low number of shows might work out and, then again, it might not. It'd be easy for me to say that if they went back to a much smaller number of ppvs a year, really having a lot of time to devote to the build of each show that the buys for the shows would be much higher. Fact of the matter is, however, I don't know that there'd be more buys. So far in 2011, including Vengeance and HIAC, WWE has sold in the range of 3.2-3.3 million ppv buys in total. All of the 13 WWE ppvs cost $44.95, with the exception of WrestleMania at $54.95, which gives the overall average ppv price at about $45.72. With that price, thus far, WWE ppvs have made somewhere in the vicinity of $146,304,000 to $150,876,000. Any way you slice it, that's a shitload of money. Reducing it back to a big 4 scenario means that, in order to equal this amount with 13 ppvs, each of the big 4 would have to generate somewhere close to 1,000,000 ppv buys each and there's no guarantee that it'd happen.

I do agree that WWE should rethink their approach to ppvs. I don't think it'd hurt to cut back on the number to some degree, but reducing them by 75% probably isn't a realistic idea.

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The WWE make a lot more from PPV than just PPV buys. Don't forget about ticket sales to said PPVs. So, if you reduce PPV from 13 to four, WWE not only lose PPV cable sales, but also there will be less PPVs for people to attend, meaning less tickets to sell.

I think Vengeance partly failed because it was badly booked. One example is that Cena-Del Rio was not named as a "Last-Man-Standing Match" until the last segment of the last "Raw" before the PPV, meaning that, if the LMS stip being added would create interest in people wanting to buy, they only had one or two days to order the PPV, whereas, if they announced it a week or two earlier, WWE may have got more buys over a longer time.

 

[d_henderson1810]

I think it's more of a creative problem. There are few big moments and a lot of promising things get hotshotted or peter out. Money In The Bank with Punk's storyline was the last big moment I can think of, preceded by the return of Rock (who didn't do anything worthwhile at Mania and the show was more or less built around him) and... I don't know... the Nexus invasion before it became about Cena overcoming the odds again? I may be missing something.

There are so many reports about RAW getting rewritten at the last minute and entire segments and angles getting new directions or entirely cancelled. There is no visible approach to look further than one or two months into the future and plan things ahead, and it shows badly. But how can you expect writers to create something compelling in such an environment? Feuds and characters are more of a constant blur than ever, I think.

The amount of PPVs is another problem, of course. There are so many and they're so poorly timed that Creative isn't even really there to develop storylines and characters, but merely to fill PPVs, on and on. Two weeks between PPVs? Of course there won't be anything compelling.
On the other hand, the number of PPVs won't be reduced, because I'm sure it pays out, at least in the short run. It will also create a stealthy apathy towards the product, but can you really expect long-term thinking from a company that (re)writes their main angles and shows just minutes before they play out?

I don't even think it's absolutely necessary to cut down the number of PPVs, but the timing is just bad. There are 52 weeks a year, with 13 PPVs and strict scheduling you can have one every four weeks. That's eight TV shows (at least 16 hours), enough time to promote PPVs if you do it clever and plan ahead. Let's say there are 12 hours of TV time (advertising substracted) and eight matches per PPV card, that's one and a half hours to promote a match, mostly more. You could create a lot in that time. That being said, you'd still have to cut pointless crap and plan ahead, and that seems to be the main problem here.

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I agree with you, and I have said, for a while, that "Raw" and "Smackdown" really should be used strictly as advertisements towards the PPVs. The night after the PPV, they should discuss the wash-up, what storylines came out of it, and then the next three weeks should be buiding towards the next PPV. Every segment and match should be persuading people to pay out $50 or whatever towards the next PPV, and make people feel that, if they miss it, they missed something special.

I would even think a major development AFTER the main-event of a PPV, would get people talking, and wanting to watch "Raw" and beyond to see how it plays out. The WWE should promote their PPVs as if to say "You MUST order this PPV, or you will miss out on something that everyone will be talking about afterwards". There should be classic matches, and developments which, if you don't order the PPV, you are a bit lost as to what happened.

But this won't happen. Firstly, they still insist on having a brand extension. When they end it, they can carry the feuds across both "Raw" and "Smackdown", giving eight weeks of storyline in four weeks.

Secondly, WWE hire comedy writers, not wrestling writers. So, instead of PPV build, we get Hornswoggle and Santino comedy skits, and things like "The Michael Cole Challenge" , which builds no-one and just embarrasses the product.