A Demand for a Comprehensive PPV Buyrate List

[Jmare007]

Mick Foley was the special referee after a long absence. That's what sold that main event. Plus, that show had Flair/Michaels.

Yeah, I just thought the Cell was always a big draw until they went overboard with it in the last couple of years.

 

 

Just curious though, did Flair/Michaels had a better build up than Piper/Hogan (the "big" undercard match for Judgement Day 03')? Was is it seen as a bigger match at the time?

[Loss]

Not sure about that. Flair/Michaels was a first-time outing though, not counting the 8-minute special from '91. That show also had Goldberg/Jericho. I don't know if I'd call that a money match, but there's appeal there, and that match was built very well, with Jericho narrowly avoiding the spear in the build and then working the match around avoiding it. Goldberg finally doing it got a big pop. But I always loved the Highlight Reel with him spraying Goldberg in the eyes, spearing him, then taking off running as fast as he could.

[NintendoLogic]

There was also the curiosity factor of it being the first single brand PPV.

[Guest Nell Santucci]

I think you've probably got all this in the edited original post now, but here's a list I put together a few months back for the Mania shows. I think they all came directly or indirectly from the Observer:

 

o WrestleMania 1 - 398,000 (Closed Circuit Television) and literally a handful on PPV.

o WrestleMania 2 - 319,000 (Closed Circuit Television) and Andre the Giant's handful on PPV.

o WrestleMania III - 450,000 (Closed Circuit Television) and another 400,000 on PPV

o WrestleMania IV - 175,000 (Closed Circuit Television), Approx 650,000 on PPV

o WrestleMania V - 767,000

o WrestleMania VI - 550,000

o WrestleMania VII - 400,000

o WrestleMania VIII - 360,000

o WrestleMania IX - 430,000

o WrestleMania X - 420,000

o WrestleMania XI - 340,000

o WrestleMania XII - 290,000

o WrestleMania 13 - 237,000

o WrestleMania XIV - 730,000

o WrestleMania XV - 800,000

o WrestleMania 2000 - 824,000

o WrestleMania X-Seven - 1,040,000 (950,000 domestic)

o WrestleMania X8 - 880,000 (domestic/intl split unknown)

o WrestleMania XIX - 560,000 (north america only?)

o WrestleMania XX - 885,000 (WWE figure, lower than that on the original version of this list) ( (domestic/intl split unknown)

o WrestleMania 21 - 1,085,000 (approx 650,000 domestic)

o WrestleMania 22 - 975,000 (approx 584,000 domestic)

o WrestleMania 23 - 1,250,000 (825,000 domestic)

o WrestleMania XXIV - 1,041,000 (697,000 domestic)

o WrestleMania XXV - 960,000 (605,000 domestic)

o WrestleMania XXVI - 885,000 (498,000 domestic)

o WrestleMania XXVII - 1,042,000 (617,000 domestic)

 

For reference, 21 was the first show on PPV in the UK, which will have added a fair chunk to the international figure.

Your numbers almost all agree with the literature, though my concern rest in your Wrestlemania II and Wrestlemania IV numbers. Why the deviation from the numbers I have? Wrestlemania VIII varies enough to the extent that it'd be worth cross-referencing.

[JNLister]

The WM4 figures are from the 1988 Observer yearbook.

 

I'm not 100% on where I got the WM2 figure. The 1986 Observer yearbook has the 250,000 PPV you mention plus 350,000 for closed circuit, though notes both of them are estimates. Though I don't recall the precise source, the 319,000 I had for closed circuit sound like a more precise figure that emerged later on, perhaps after Dave got to see the company books.

 

My gut instinct is that 250,000 for PPV seems a little high, but I don't think I've seen a precise figure to contradict it.

[Guest Nell Santucci]

The WM4 figures are from the 1988 Observer yearbook.

 

I'm not 100% on where I got the WM2 figure. The 1986 Observer yearbook has the 250,000 PPV you mention plus 350,000 for closed circuit, though notes both of them are estimates. Though I don't recall the precise source, the 319,000 I had for closed circuit sound like a more precise figure that emerged later on, perhaps after Dave got to see the company books.

 

My gut instinct is that 250,000 for PPV seems a little high, but I don't think I've seen a precise figure to contradict it.

Yeah. Who knows? I will give your post more thought when I'm less busy. With respect to Dave, I e-mailed him, and he didn't reply. We all need to start bugging him about this. I mean, Christ, on Wikipedia, people used that dumb standard of 1.0 = 400,000 buys, and the Wikitardians are writing nonsense like In Your House (Sid/Diesel, May 1995) got 320,000 buys, which is ridiculous because that would imply IYH had 20,000 less buys than Wrestlemania XI and almost 100,000 more buys than Wrestlemania XII (lol?). So there you go.

 

Let's start a campaign and bug him to put it in an Observer soon.

[Jmare007]

WWE updated their Key Performance Indicators with figures for the third quarter of this year, which only includes July. You can read the full PDF report at this link (http://www.snl.com/interactive/lookandfeel...-Indicators.pdf), here are some highlights:

 

* WWE Money in the Bank in July did 196,000 buys (108K buys domestic, 88K buys international). It looks to have done slightly better than last year's event, which did 195,000 buys.

[Guest Nell Santucci]

Does anyone have a clue who I could contact to get PPV numbers? I wouldn't mind writing to the WWE itself and getting those numbers. Does Zane have all the numbers? Did WCW release their numbers publicly?

 

EDIT: I wrote to Dave Meltzer again. Hopefully he'll respond. Maybe he hates me. LOL

[Guest Nell Santucci]

Major research news coming soon. I'll explain the mathematical derivation such that we can get all the research for both WWF and WCW PPVs. I'll direct what I need for missing variables.

[Dooley]

Why do closed circuit numbers end after WM4? I ask because I watched WM5 on closed-circuit. Did they just start putting the numbers together at that point?

[Bix]

WM4 was the last year where CCTV was a substantial part of the equation. WM5 still did pretty well but CCTV fell off a cliff with WM6.

[rainmakerrtv]

WM4 was the last year where CCTV was a substantial part of the equation. WM5 still did pretty well but CCTV fell off a cliff with WM6.

Why was that? Did PPV make it redundant?

[Bix]

WM4 was the last year where CCTV was a substantial part of the equation. WM5 still did pretty well but CCTV fell off a cliff with WM6.

Why was that? Did PPV make it redundant?

 

Yup.

[Guest Nell Santucci]

Does anyone know how much WCW charged for the 1995 Slamboree? I have a PPV number and want to run a test very soon on my derivation. (I'm in the process of moving now and just don't have that much Internet access unless I'm on school property.)

[Bix]

I THINK the WCW PPVs were something weird like $27.50 around that time.

[Sean Liska]

Dave did a history of SummerSlam in the new issue and has these numbers -

 

88 - About 400,000

89 - 625,000

90 - Estimated 507,000

91 - 405,000

92 - About 280,000

93 - About 250,000

98- 700,000

99 - 600,000

2001 - 570,000

2002 - 540,000

2004 - 320,000

2005 - 640,000

[JNLister]

89 is notable because it did better than the following WrestleMania. Part of that was just inevitable decline as the product called and the PPV market got more saturated, but there was definitely a degree of "Jeez, Hogan-Warrior drew less than Zeus."

[Ricky Jackson]

The Summerslam 89 number is a definitely a testament to how hot the Hogan-Savage feud really was.

[NintendoLogic]

The Summerslam 89 number is a definitely a testament to how hot the Hogan-Savage feud really was.

According to Dave, it was a testament to how well they built up Zeus.

[Ricky Jackson]

Meltzer? I thought we stopped taking him seriously years ago. I mean really, 78,000 for Mania III? Bah. Nonsense.

 

Seriously though, I'm sticking with the continuation of the Hogan-Savage feud being the main draw, with the addition of a well built-up Zeus as a nice bonus.

[Sean Liska]

Zeus was the main focus of the build for that match. The two big SNME angles were centered on him - not letting Hogan into the cage before the Bossman match, and no selling Hogan's chair shots after the Beefcake-Savage match and then doing a staredown.

[Strummer]

Have to credit Tommy Lister here. In the build Hogan acted exceedingly scared of Zeus and the announcers acted like he had no chance against him. As Dave put it once, Hogan sold Zeus's nerve hold "Like he'd been shot". Hogan had never acted so fearful of an opponent. Of course the day of the show he was calm and collective (while being pro wrestling hyper at the same time obviously) and acted like it was no sweat but that's how the WWF did business back then. I'm not saying Savage was an afterthought but clearly the build was if Hogan could somehow beat Zeus

[khawk20]

Have to credit Tommy Lister here. In the build Hogan acted exceedingly scared of Zeus and the announcers acted like he had no chance against him. As Dave put it once, Hogan sold Zeus's nerve hold "Like he'd been shot". Hogan had never acted so fearful of an opponent. Of course the day of the show he was calm and collective (while being pro wrestling hyper at the same time obviously) and acted like it was no sweat but that's how the WWF did business back then. I'm not saying Savage was an afterthought but clearly the build was if Hogan could somehow beat Zeus

By conincidence, I've been watching a lot of the WWE Classics on Demand Prime Time Wrestling shows this week, all to do with the pre-build to Summerslam, and yeah, they built it very well.

[nwa88]

Greetings!

 

I posted the following on another wrestling forum in regards to this particular subject recently, but seeing how as the topic has been raised over here, I thought I would post it again and hopefully offer some help with the project.

-------------------

 

I've been working on an ongoing project to compile a database of buyrates for WWF and WCW PPVs (among others) going back to the 1980s.

 

It has been brought to my attention that there are issues with many of figures for these shows that have popped up in the Wrestling Observer and such over the years and I'd like to try to arrive at some more pinpointed numbers as there is a lot of misinformation going on over the internet about this topic.

 

Also, I'm hoping to get the attention of another member here, as I know he's working on a similar project and I thought we spitball and compare some numbers.

 

At any rate, my eventual plan is to develop some sort of website or web application with the data so that there is a central and comprehensive source for accurate numbers -- or in the case where hard numbers don't exist or cannot be agreed upon, a place to gather all of the different speculated numbers for a show.

 

I'd like to offer some help with this project, as this is a topic I've been studying for many years. Around the summer of 1997, I became quite interested in buyrates in general and began collecting a lot of the available data online and simultaneously became intrigued with the sheer amount of inconsistency that seemed to exist in the numbers depending on who was reporting them.

 

As you know, most of the numbers found online for calculated buys are simply not reliable for pre-WWE era shows. Many of them have been pulled from an older incarnation of the “Wrestling Information Archive” website several years ago. The person who ran that site failed to account for the expanding and contracting size of the PPV universe and thus overestimated the number of buys for pretty much all shows before 2002 or so. That is a huge source for a lot of misinformation about buyrates and buys, as I'm sure many of you are aware. Other sites have tried hard to report just the facts as they have come from sources, most notably the Pro Wrestling History website, which has been keeping track of the buyrates since 1996 or so. Most of their numbers seem to come directly from the old Observer Newsletter.

 

In fact, The Wrestling Observer is just about the most prominent source of the information on wrestling buyrate information online. It is a helpful and important source for information on this topic, and I’ve read through many years of them extensively, but there are some problems with Dave's numbers that will have to be worked out. This is why I wanted to alert Nell Santucci, as I believe he is using Meltzer’s audience estimates to come up with a PPV audience growth rate formula. Meltzer's PPV universe numbers seem to be quite unreliable.

 

I'd break-down the issues with Dave Meltzer's numbers in the Observers into the following areas:

 

1. Often times, he is given the actual buyrate for a show from a rep and calculates the number of buys himself. This is clear in many of his 1980s entries. The problem with this method is that from almost all of the figures I've been able to find, the pay-per-view audience size he uses in his calculations is usually off, sometimes by quite a bit. In many cases it's because he's basing them on the numbers for the previous year’s PPV universe. For a couple of years he inexplicably used 20 million as a base audience figure (which Herb Kunze often repeated in good faith, but I believe he called some question to the practice as well in some of his RSPW posts) despite a substantial growth in the size of the PPV universe over the period in question. At times, there is a lack of consistency in his numbers regarding the audience size as well, often within the same year or even the same month. For example, for WCW Mayhem 1999 he states that it "did 0.43 buyrate or 168,000 buys". For Survivor Series 1999, which occurred in the same month, he reports that it "did a 1.14 or 425,000 buys". The first number suggests a potential PPV universe of 39 million homes, while the second suggest a PPV universe of around 37 million homes. The PPV audience is ever expanding and contracting, but not that at that rapid of a rate. Whatever factors may be at fault here (miscalculations, mistakes, wrong estimates, shady promoters) the numbers are not accurate.

 

2. Conversely at other times he is given the # of buys themselves (which we can only hope come from an independent industry source, although his sources are not always divulged) and calculates the buyrate himself based on what he believes to be the size of the audience. Once again, you run into a similar problem with the audience size. Furthermore this has caused inaccurate buyrate %s to be repeated and published subsequently. I think in these instances as long as the source is deemed reliable, that it would be better to use the buys given to him and recalculate the buyrate % based on those numbers, as his buyrate percentages are not likely accurate in those situations.

 

3. Satellite and cable companies often take months to get all of the reported buys in, which affects the buyrate % and Meltzer does not always follow up on those shows down the line and update the numbers, although he’s usually been pretty good about it. Just FYI, historically buyrates are given as an average of the reporting markets. The buyrate is a simply a percentage of the average of each individual cable systems ratio of purchases to customers. Initial reports are often high -- for example, if the initial buyrate report comes back for a show including cable companies in wrestling hotbeds like Los Angeles and New York first, then the rate will normally come in artificially high, since those tend to have a higher percentage of orders than other areas. The same is true for the stated number of buys -- those numbers are only an estimate in preliminary reports, as it takes up to a year before all of the individual buys are actually counted and tabulated. As you’d expect, they often come out lower than the initial estimates, as we’ve seen even this year with the WWE’s WrestleMania buys being revised several times, vacillating between 1.1 and 1.3 million buys. This is probably the biggest obstacle in pinning down numbers -- and if you could find an independent source with the *final* buys or buyrates for pre WWE era shows, then you'd have much more accurate information to work with. There are a few sources out there with some of this information that I’m trying to get my hands on it, but they are not easy to come by. What I’ve got so far has been via interlibrary loans – some publications that would come in especially handy are the following ones: The Pay TV Newsletter and the Cable TV Financial Databook Annual. Both of these publications include research by the media firm Paul Kagan and Associates, who I have found has offered the most consistent data on the size of PPV audiences over the years and are frequently sourced in discussions regarding it. I’m hoping some of these publications have information on specific shows as well, since they routinely published lists of the highest grossing PPVs when called upon for that information.

 

4. The growth of satellite TV creates a little bit of confusion with some of the numbers as well. Historically PPV availability was reported by the cable industry only, with satellite PPV audience size access presumably lumped in with cable. This changed in 1997, when the cable industry began to stagnate in terms of subscriber growth, but PPV grew tremendously anyway due to the proliferation of satellite TV subscriptions. This helped get PPV to areas that were previously unreachable due to their remoteness. At any rate, around this time a lot of reports on PPV audience size began to not include satellite subscriptions, which I've found were reported separately or not at all for some years. Cracking this one is going to be especially tricky for the period of 1999 to 2002, as there is still some missing data to gather on satellite availability.

 

3. Contradictory data appearing or mistakes made over time -- the Summer Slam 1998 buyrate is one of the most notable, inflating from about 500,000 buys in 1998 up to 700,000 buys. I would guess it was in 2003, but Meltzer suddenly began reporting the 700k number when it was previously reported by just about everyone (including himself and several independent sources) that the show did between 500k and 530k buys. Not sure what has led to the revision.

 

4. Wrestling companies often lie about the number of buys and the buyrates. I'm sure you've heard this or likely seen it yourself. It's remarked upon in the Observer at multiple points as well, and there are several of Multichannel News Articles that quote WWE spokesperson Skip Desjardin, where you can track the lies from year to year. See his reports on the buyrates for SummerSlam 1993 and 1994 – as the math makes no sense given what he is saying. It does seem to be more notable in the WWF than WCW once you get to the 1990s for some reason (not so in the 1980s though) but WCW had a few shows where they tried to pull a fast one too -- most notably Bash at the Beach 1997, although that was later verified. The WrestleMania 14 buyrate is a bit suspect too in my opinion -- as the “final” numbers for the show came out unusually far over the preliminary estimated buyrate of 1.78 (farther than any reported show has over a preliminary estimate and by a large margin based on what I’ve seen for preliminary figures for other shows). The number seems to have never been corroborated by a non- WWF source either, so the 2.2 or 2.3% reported might be pure fantasy. Personally I’d make the case that this sort of makes sense too, given the WWF was much more popular in 1999 than mid-1998 – and yet the WrestleMania 15 buyrate was just about the same. It doesn't make a lot of sense that they would convert so many normally non-buying customers into buyers for one show and by such a substantial margin. The "Tyson" effect is usually cited, but I think his impact may be overstated outside the arena, as most of Tyson's fights after the 2nd Holyfield fight in 1997 did poor buyrates until his Lennox Lewis fight in 2002, so I’m not sure he was really the draw people thought he was in 1998. One other notable discrepancy is with the WrestleMania 4 and 5 buyrates -- with Meltzer noting that they did very similar numbers in terms of buys, and at one point that WrestleMania 4 had done more buys, but he's obviously revised that figure to push WM5 much higher. I’m not sure why the change was made, because it doesn’t seem to hold up in the math. WrestleMania III has also been reported as high as 10.2 and as low as 8.

 

5. Getting reliable figures on the size of the PPV audience is difficult, which makes establishing a month to month rate of growth difficult as well. The size of the PPV universe does vary from month to month, but the updated figure is normally published only once a year by media sources, leading me to believe the previous year’s shows are often either underestimated (based on the previous years average audience) or over-estimated (based on the growth estimates of the next years PPV universe). This is where establishing some sort of formula would come in handy, based on the PPV universe data for each year, to calculate a growth rate from month to month that would make recalculating buys for each event easier.

 

 

6. As far as calculating a formula, it should also be noted that the growth in the PPV universe is not likely to be strictly linear -- there were a few key events that occurred along the way to cause spikes and contractions in the PPV available universe. I’m not a mathematician, so I’m not sure if the spikes deviate enough from the averages for the function to be considered non-linear, but the PPV universe certainly has not always expanded upwards.

 

7. Yet another commonly missed issue is that of traps and addressability. For those not aware, a lot of data reported on the size of the PPV universe only count addressable homes (i.e. homes that can receive PPV via a bi-directional box, typically orders taken by phone, remote, or set top box menus) but some cable systems sold PPV via contract with customers using descrambler units rented out directly to the subscriber. This was because of the high cost of converting to an addressable cable system which allowed PPV to be deployed (or “addressed”) remotely. Many mid-sized cable companies could not afford this, didn’t want to pass on the expense of the boxes to the customers, or did not have the channel capacity to include a full-time PPV network, so they strictly offered selected events, carried over a channel that normally hosted some other type of programming (typically leased access or paid programming). One way around having an addressable system was to use positive traps on the boxes instead, similar to those used to prevent viewers from watching premium channels on non-addressable boxes. You see this reference in old movies and TV a lot, where the tenant pays the cable employee $50 for all the premium channels – it's the same idea. These traps were placed on the cable line or within the box itself to filter out particular ranges of channels, but they can be removed or descrambled with an external device. There were a few significant drives to get cable companies to use this system in order to get a chunk of the PPV pie when the going was good, but for whatever reason these figures seem to be excluded from estimates of the PPV audience, perhaps due to the difficulty of gathering the data. I've seen it referred to just a few times in the literature I've read, but I have personally experienced it and it seems to have been substantial in some cases. This article from the LA Times in 1992 makes reference to it (http://articles.latimes.com/1992-05-20/business/fi-281_1_cable-operators/2) and suggests as many as 10 million potential customers used traps -- which is a substantial portion of the PPV universe in 1992. This is much less of an issue from about 1995 on as most systems were addressable by that point, but prior to that there may be a substantial portion of the audience that is unaccounted for or is accounted for in an inconsistent manner.

 

6. Dave Meltzer himself stated in an April 1991 edition of the Observer that there was some over-counting going on in his own calculations of the audience size -- because he was presumably using the combined reported PPV universe sizes stated by the two major PPV companies (Request and Viewer's choice) who both distributed WWF and NWA/WCW PPVs for his calculations. There is some overlap between the customer bases however. As an example, Request and Viewer’s choice combined may have had access to let’s say 10 million customers at one point, but some cable networks carried both channels on their systems, which means that those are not necessarily going be 10 million unique customers. This may be a major issue, especially with the 1980s shows where he seems unaware of this fact. The actual reported buys themselves are likely too high.

 

7. Not all WWF and WCW PPVs were offered every month, in every market, before about 1990 or so and even after that in some areas. I'm sure we'll have some user confirmations of this, but many cable companies in the late 1980s would often pick and choose what PPVs they would carry, limiting them to just a few events, which has an impact upon the size of the calculated PPV audience, and therefore the actual buyrate. Meltzer occasionally identifies this issue, most notably in reference to Starrcade 1987 and also the WWE’s dispute with DirecTV that caused them to drop coverage for a few PPV shows. There is probably no way to acquire information on this, so we'll just have to assume it was not substantial, although I'd hypothesize that it particularly impacts the early NWA/WCW buyrates the most since they did not have the market saturation the WWF did.

 

8. One other issue I'll mention briefly as far as calculating the amount of money generated by a PPV -- the price of a PPV was not always a standard thing before the 1990s -- some markets charged slightly more and slightly less for the same show until PPV went national. Furthermore complicating it is that for certain shows, you received a discount for the event if you ordered early, but paid full price for a day-of-the-event buy. Lastly there may be special situations that need to be identified, such as Starrcade 1991, where WCW charged $19.99 instead of the usual $19.95, but did not pocket the four cents, it was instead donated to the Starlight Foundation. At any rate, I'm happy to give whatever price data I saved once the prices became standardized.

 

So at any rate, those are the issues as I see it. I guess my ultimate goal is to help come up with something to display all of the known information – information for a show if it is available or a notation for a show where it is not, along with the various estimates that can be cobbled together. It would be nice to have a line for each show that is a recalculation of the buyrate and audience size based on known data, if for no other reason than comparison purposes to see how feasible a particular reported number is.

[artDDP]

I THINK the WCW PPVs were something weird like $27.50 around that time.

I remember them being $27.95 for a long time and wondering why they were just a little cheaper than the WWF's $29.95 when their production values were night-and-day.