Someone else will need to refresh my memory on the details, but wasn't there some kind of obscure Turner accounting practice which artificially bumped WCW's net revenue up during the boom years? Something like crediting them with being paid money from some other branch of Turner which technically wasn't income, but was counted as such anyway. That's one reason why the 96-98 years were such vastly better financial statements than all the others.Two things changed:1. Early in the Nitro era, Bischoff got TBS and TNT to pay rights fees to WCW for the TV shows. If this had been done before, WCW would have never had a year in the red.
2. Certain wrestlers were being paid by other divisions of Turner Broadcasting for creative accounting reasons, hence the relatively small amount of wrestler contracts that the WWF procured via buying WCW's assets.
EDIT: Slickster beat me to it.