You going a little too far. They are not bigger than CMLL and AAA has had stretches bigger than AEW's first run.
Comparing 2020's revenue to the old territories is not possible. It's also kind of unfair to compare attendance (nowadays it's much more expensive and there's way more shyt to do than going to the local wrestling show). But even still, I see no argument for AEW to be put ahead of AWA and Memphis, those two territories were profitable and were selling big arenas for 5-7 year runs, multiple times.
And I'm almost positive territories like Florida, Detroit and San Francisco had runs that were more successful to those promotions than the first 3 years of AEW were to that company.
I think WCCW is a good comp in terms of a short run catching fire,taking the business by surprise and elevating itself as a top place in wrestling.
Again though, it's unfair to compare them because a national promotion has other challenges, specially in the 2020s.
There's so many ways that it's impractical to compare now to even Ruthless Aggression and Attitude era, much less territory days. Economic model nowadays is completely different.
Back in the Attitude era, even though being on TV was essential, media rights was a small fraction of their revenue. The TV was there for exposure to drive their main revenue sources of gate, merch, and PPV buys. On the new Smackdown deal with USA Network, Smackdown for 2 hours is going to be making about $5.5 million a week, that's more than double what Raw was making for the entire year in 1998.
That year they were paid $45K a week, which is $2.34 million a year. Their entire economic model was based on variable revenue streams, if they started to nosedive in those then it was bad news, really, really bad news.
In 2022, 80% of WWE's revenue came from a fixed source in media. Now TV is essential because it's the only thing that enables companies like AEW and WWE to be as big as they are.
Sure, AEW's model is a little different because they do PPVs, so that's going to skew things a bit less towards media for AEW because they do make a sizeable chunk of money off PPVs.
But their option that got picked up by WBD this year was allegedly for $175 million.
There's zero chance they are making even close to half as much on gate, merch, and PPV buys that they are making on media rights. I base that on the concrete numbers we get for some TV tapings and PPV (both in gate and buys). For merch, in 2022 WWE did about the same amount in merch as they did in live gate, considering AEW's in-arena merch is shyt (or at least was), I would estimate their merch revenue is less than their gate revenue.
So now if live gate and merch starts to crater? Okay, well that's still bad, but it's nowhere close to the five-alarm fire situation that it would have been in the 90s and earlier as long as they have that big media rights money coming in.
www.youtube.com
and that was direct head to head competition
never heard of him or his site before today
