The aging of wrestling fans

[Loss]

I'm not quite sure what I want to say about this topic, but I think it's interesting and wanted to at least start the discussion.

Message boards already seem a bit archaic, but obviously the posters at our board have been aging for a while now. Now we're also seeing that in wrestling at large.

I thought this could be a catch-all thread for people to discuss why they think this is happening, thoughts on what to do about it, and also over time just post more examples of this trend taking hold in different forms.

Wrestling doesn't seem to have much appeal to teens and people in their early 20s at the moment and there are a lot of reasons for that, most likely.

Not even thinking about wrestling as a whole, but just this subgenre of hardcore fandom, I do sometimes wish we had more "young" voices involved that were discovering a lot of things the rest of us grew up on the first time, but those voices seem hard to find. 

Anyway, have at it.

[El-P]

I'm already depressed by the fact I'm turning 45 in two days, great timing for this thread...

I dunno, the demographic and sociological aspect of the pro-wrestling audience is quite fascinating to me. I'm sure there would be much to say about it. As far as message board goes, yeah, seems like something out of another era, honestly (and sadly, as I don't think social medias as they are working today are conducive to better discussions and sharing of ideas at all... Maybe the future of such a community of a "niche inside a niche" is on Twitch or something).

I wonder how many people active regularly on the board are products of the mid 90's or late 90's/early 00's discussions sites and boards and how much came much much later.

[Flyin' Brian]

It’s not just wrestling. I see it in comics and other things too. I think part of it has to do with how it is presented and consumed. Wrestling is mostly presented via television, where a lot of younger people have migrated towards other places for their entertainment (video games, streaming, etc.) Wrestling is available in those forms but it’s not the primary form. YouTube and WWE on Hulu are just regurgitated parts of the main shows for the most part, not much content is produced primarily for those channels. The people that are producing that content are primarily the wrestlers themselves and now wwe is cracking down on that. The other parallels I see are appealing to older fans through the characters and storytelling instead of creating new stars and new ideas. Corporate culture where ‘the brand’ is the most important thing and what is primarily promoted and not the wrestlers themselves doesn’t help bring in new people. If anything that turns off younger viewers, whether it is an anti corporate/anti capitalism feeling or it just not being ‘cool’ to support a company instead of the people actually doing the work. 
 

I think if a company wants newer and younger fans they need to go to where they are and appeal to them directly, not wait for them to come to where the company already is. They need to produce a product that is made for them not their parents or grandparents. Family friendly/generational is ok but the new stars need to be made and put on equal footing at least as the old ones. The wrestlers themselves need to take precedence over the company, because they are who newer fans will latch onto. 

[Sean Reedy]

I think wrestling was just more interesting to be a hardcore fan of back in the 80s-90s due to technology and the general insanity of the business. Remembering my younger years, making my parents drive me an hour to a Japanese supermarket to pick up the latest AJPW/NJPW tapes and being so thrilled to watch them, sitting in an AOL chat room waiting for someone to get back from Prodigy to tell us what was happening in this crazy bingo hall in Philly, going through the work to complete a tape trade to see an Onita exploding barbed wire baseball match that seemed like the craziest thing in the world, going through the work to discover the Observer and reading this thing that felt like it shouldn't exist, this stuff took a lot of effort that lead to passion. And the behind the scenes was just more interesting when the business was crazier, its become much more corporate, which is good for everyone but not as interesting. WWE's two top stars, Bret and Shawn, getting into a legit fist fight backstage before RAW and everything from there leading to the Montreal screwjob, Pillman's whole thing in front of and behind the camera, Flair having the NWA world title on WWE TV, the steroid trial, Terry Funk almost burning down the ECW Arena, it was wild. Now being a hardcore fan is more choosing from what 9 hours of big time national American TV you want to watch, throw in about 20 hours of NJPW content a month that takes two clicks to watch, and comment on Reddit or Twitter. Look at the Observer awards. So I think we came from a time that encouraged more passion where now its a TV show to watch and talk about on the internet. I will say that AEW signing Paul Wight gave me a buzz that reminded me of the old days just because of how unexpected it was with Wight being a presumed WWE lifer, and AEW continuing to grow and genuinely challenge WWE will help drive more interest in the behind the scenes stuff that used to make wrestling so much fun.

[Sean Reedy]

In terms of general interest,  interesting question that made me do some research. RAW destroys everything on cable in M12-34 except the NBA.  SD was 2nd on Friday night in 18-34, losing slightly to Shark Tank. On Thursday its number was only below Celebrity Wheel of Fortune and again was close. Wednesday there was nothing higher. Tuesday just lost to This Is Us which I guess is huge with that audience. Monday it took a big trouncing from The Bachelor, The Neighborhood, and the 911 shows. Sunday it lost to American Idol, America's Funniest Home Videos, and 60 minutes.

I dunno, maybe I'm looking at the numbers wrong, but isn't wrestling kind of insanely healthy when its near top 10 in that demo in overall network TV and destroys everything but the NBA on cable?

[joeg]

Yeah I've talked about it else where on the board. The wrestling business has done very little in the last 20 years to appeal to young people, women or people of color. And that's why the fanbase is what it is, a bunch of late 20s to mid 40 something straight white dudes with beer guts and neckbeards who grew up in the 80s and 90s and have stayed around. I hoped AEW would try to reach out to a wider audience but they seem to just be doubling down on giving the die hard internet fans (i.e. us) what we want instead of reaching a wider, younger audience.

Last week I was watching an interview with Christopher Jackson (the guy who played George Washington in Hamilton) and he talked about how important it is for young people to be able to identify with and relate to those they see in the arts. There is no top guy right now in wrestling that is relatable to kids. Nobody who speaks their language, looks like them, dresses like them, etc. AEW's top guys are only relatable to skinny white guys in their 30s who are obsessed with wrestling. I think Eddie Kingston is relatable to teenagers but he's not a top guy really. I knew a lot of Eddie Kingstons growing up, and still do. Haven't seen any of them since COVID as I haven't been going out much let alone to the sort of bars that sell $3 dollar boiler makers.  WWE doesn't have top guys and if they did none of them would be relatable to anybody.  I think Matt Riddle could be relatable to teenagers. Every high school and every frat house has that lovable dumb jock who is all about partying hard and getting high. But WWE has managed to mess that up by making him a caricature of Bill and Ted's Bogus Adventures.  

I make a living teaching in a title one middle school, coaching sports at a high school, and have run after school programs in some rougher parts of town. Because of that I like to think I'm more in touch with youth culture than your average 35 year old, that I'm more "woke" than most. And I can tell you very few of the kids I work with watch wrestling. And the few that do watch are more likely to follow AAA or CMLL on twitch and youtube than they are to watch WWE. Lucha is what their parents grew up watching, its part of the cultural heritage in a way, the wrestlers look like them and are from where they are from, and kids are far more likely to be on twitch and youtube anyways. So lucha is more relatable and accessible to these kids (at least in the community I work in) than WWE despite WWE's dominance of the market place.   

[Rah]

I've got nothing inciteful to add but the topic did make me wonder how Concrete1992 and Tanner are doing and if they still don't know wrestling?

[Flyin' Brian]

18 hours ago, Sean Reedy said:

In terms of general interest,  interesting question that made me do some research. RAW destroys everything on cable in M12-34 except the NBA.  SD was 2nd on Friday night in 18-34, losing slightly to Shark Tank. On Thursday its number was only below Celebrity Wheel of Fortune and again was close. Wednesday there was nothing higher. Tuesday just lost to This Is Us which I guess is huge with that audience. Monday it took a big trouncing from The Bachelor, The Neighborhood, and the 911 shows. Sunday it lost to American Idol, America's Funniest Home Videos, and 60 minutes.

I dunno, maybe I'm looking at the numbers wrong, but isn't wrestling kind of insanely healthy when its near top 10 in that demo in overall network TV and destroys everything but the NBA on cable?

They might be getting most of the people in that age bracket that are watching tv percentage wise, but overall numbers wise how many people is that compared to what the numbers were years ago? I guess it comes down to what you want to have, a bigger piece of a smaller pie that keeps shrinking or be part of something that has the potential to grow. Comparatively wrestling might look healthy when compared to the current tv landscape, but when comparing to past eras and to other things competing for eyeballs outside of the tv bubble maybe not. 

[Flyin' Brian]

18 hours ago, Sean Reedy said:

In terms of general interest,  interesting question that made me do some research. RAW destroys everything on cable in M12-34 except the NBA.  SD was 2nd on Friday night in 18-34, losing slightly to Shark Tank. On Thursday its number was only below Celebrity Wheel of Fortune and again was close. Wednesday there was nothing higher. Tuesday just lost to This Is Us which I guess is huge with that audience. Monday it took a big trouncing from The Bachelor, The Neighborhood, and the 911 shows. Sunday it lost to American Idol, America's Funniest Home Videos, and 60 minutes.

I dunno, maybe I'm looking at the numbers wrong, but isn't wrestling kind of insanely healthy when its near top 10 in that demo in overall network TV and destroys everything but the NBA on cable?

They might be getting most of the people in that age bracket that are watching tv percentage wise, but overall numbers wise how many people is that compared to what the numbers were years ago? I guess it comes down to what you want to have, a bigger piece of a smaller pie that keeps shrinking or be part of something that has the potential to grow. Comparatively wrestling might look healthy when compared to the current tv landscape, but when comparing to past eras and to other things competing for eyeballs outside of the tv bubble maybe not. Just to provide a comparison, the most viewed Twitch stream in 2021 topped out at 2,390,718 viewers. Has any WWE programming hit that number this year? 

 

[Matt D]

14 minutes ago, Flyin' Brian said:

They might be getting most of the people in that age bracket that are watching tv percentage wise, but overall numbers wise how many people is that compared to what the numbers were years ago? I guess it comes down to what you want to have, a bigger piece of a smaller pie that keeps shrinking or be part of something that has the potential to grow. Comparatively wrestling might look healthy when compared to the current tv landscape, but when comparing to past eras and to other things competing for eyeballs outside of the tv bubble maybe not. 

It’s like anything else. It’s all about what people (or big media companies) will pay for it. 

[Flyin' Brian]

4 minutes ago, Matt D said:

It’s like anything else. It’s all about what people (or big media companies) will pay for it. 

At some point though it seems viewership would finally drop far enough that they won’t pay for it anymore, or at least not enough. Maybe they think they can flip a switch at that point and make new stars or do something big to get popular again, but that’s a risky gamble.

[Migs]

1 hour ago, Flyin' Brian said:

It’s not just wrestling. I see it in comics and other things too.

I was wondering about this too. I think there's a shift in the consumption of things like wrestling and comics where older fans are 1) more likely to stick with it and 2) are interested in ("demand" on social media) things the younger fans aren't always interested in, and the companies have responded to it. To an extent, this makes sense - these older fans have plenty of disposable income and more lucrative than marketing to kids. But it's also a real shift in the target audience and how you're trying to engage with them.

[NintendoLogic]

Also, young fans are where the vast majority of future wrestlers will come from. If only a few hundred thousand are watching rather than several million, that means far fewer youngsters attempting to enter the business, and the ones that do are much less likely to be the cream of the crop. That's a big part of why AJW ended up going down the tubes.

[Migs]

25 minutes ago, Flyin' Brian said:

At some point though it seems viewership would finally drop far enough that they won’t pay for it anymore, or at least not enough. Maybe they think they can flip a switch at that point and make new stars or do something big to get popular again, but that’s a risky gamble.

It really depends on viewership relative to other things. People say "look how many less people are watching wrestling !" but it's really an apples and oranges comparison compared to 20 years ago, when there was really no way to consume wrestling other than a TV show. There are smash hit shows now that would have been cancelled in a week 20 years ago if they did the same numbers.

This is the point I think people miss when they say AEW needs to reach for a wider audience - it's so hard to find a new audience that cares enough to stick with something on TV nowadays. Maybe people watch the Shaq match and it makes them casually aware of AEW, and that's great... but the odds of making them a regular viewer are really low when they have all of recorded TV history at their fingertips. I think there's a lot of wisdom in just doing the show you want to do, and if it doesn't break things wide open, at least you made good art that people who enjoy your kind of art already will enjoy.

[Flyin' Brian]

4 minutes ago, NintendoLogic said:

Also, young fans are where the vast majority of future wrestlers will come from. If only a few hundred thousand are watching rather than several million, that means far fewer youngsters attempting to enter the business, and the ones that do are much less likely to be the cream of the crop. That's a big part of why AJW ended up going down the tubes.

I don’t know if in the long run that would be such a bad thing. Most comic creators in the beginning weren’t fans turned pros, they were just hired to do a job and trying to make money. There are some great creators who were fans and some that weren’t, but the worst things to come out of the fan to pro pipeline was being a slave to continuity and some stories being more or less paid fan fiction. There is some great stuff that came out of it but it’s also been a diminishing returns situation as the focus maybe shifted from telling the best stories to worrying about how everything fits together and obscure references. Wrestling sometimes suffers from ignoring continuity but that’s because they ignore it not to do something different but to keep doing the same things over and over again. Same as comics, there are good wrestlers that were fans turned pros and good wrestlers that came from other sports or were just looking for a way to make money based on the skills and attributes they had. 

[Flyin' Brian]

7 minutes ago, Migs said:

It really depends on viewership relative to other things. People say "look how many less people are watching wrestling !" but it's really an apples and oranges comparison compared to 20 years ago, when there was really no way to consume wrestling other than a TV show. There are smash hit shows now that would have been cancelled in a week 20 years ago if they did the same numbers.

This is the point I think people miss when they say AEW needs to reach for a wider audience - it's so hard to find a new audience that cares enough to stick with something on TV nowadays. Maybe people watch the Shaq match and it makes them casually aware of AEW, and that's great... but the odds of making them a regular viewer are really low when they have all of recorded TV history at their fingertips. I think there's a lot of wisdom in just doing the show you want to do, and if it doesn't break things wide open, at least you made good art that people who enjoy your kind of art already will enjoy.

I agree to a point. I think you’re limiting yourself if you don’t try to reach out to a bigger audience, but you’re right that the main product has to be good and something people want to see. There’s just not a mainstream draw right now that would make people want to tune in. There’s no Hulk Hogan, no Rock, no Stone Cold, no Cena, to give examples of wrestlers who were able to transcend wrestling and bring people in to see them. The brand by itself can’t do that. WCW with few exceptions never had people who transcended wrestling that were wrestlers, so they were always bringing things in from outside of wrestling for star power. AEW seems to be following that lead. WWF/WWE was able to create that buzz in the past but it’s been a long time since we have seen any wrestler with crossover potential in any promotion, partly because of the way they are presented and partly because of the wrestlers themselves. 

[Migs]

I do think there are some AEW guys with crossover potential, but it's not that explosive "wrestling boom period" potential. I know plenty of people who were brought back to watching wrestling by the Elite guys, especially Omega, who find him someone they relate to as a character and has hooked people. But what I'd say is generally true of a lot of those people is that they were fans of other niche artforms - anime and drag, for two examples - and found wrestling was another artform they liked. That's a very different appeal than being someone that a room full of 15-year-olds can agree on.

[sek69]

23 hours ago, joeg said:

Last week I was watching an interview with Christopher Jackson (the guy who played George Washington in Hamilton) and he talked about how important it is for young people to be able to identify with and relate to those they see in the arts. There is no top guy right now in wrestling that is relatable to kids. Nobody who speaks their language, looks like them, dresses like them, etc. AEW's top guys are only relatable to skinny white guys in their 30s who are obsessed with wrestling. I think Eddie Kingston is relatable to teenagers but he's not a top guy really. I knew a lot of Eddie Kingstons growing up, and still do. Haven't seen any of them since COVID as I haven't been going out much let alone to the sort of bars that sell $3 dollar boiler makers.  WWE doesn't have top guys and if they did none of them would be relatable to anybody.  I think Matt Riddle could be relatable to teenagers. Every high school and every frat house has that lovable dumb jock who is all about partying hard and getting high. But WWE has managed to mess that up by making him a caricature of Bill and Ted's Bogus Adventures.  

Funny thing is wrestling, even WWE, has done much better with presenting people of color on their shows as of late. I mean we had Apollo on Smackdown last night talking about his great grandfather being a king in Nigeria. 

AEW's biggest issue that I can see is that most of their acts that would appeal to young fans are still super young and green themselves, so it's kind of tricky to feature talent that may not be ready for prime time. 

[joeg]

34 minutes ago, sek69 said:

AEW's biggest issue that I can see is that most of their acts that would appeal to young fans are still super young and green themselves, so it's kind of tricky to feature talent that may not be ready for prime time. 

I think you hit the nail on the head. Jungle Boy, MJF, Adam Page, Marq Quen, Darby Allen.... all young and talented. All could appeal to a younger fan base. All are greener than goose shit. The closest to being ready for that top spot is Page and they've misused him from day one. 

[MoS]

I think Darby Allin and Private Party in particular are potential superstars on AEW's roster. Darby in particular I see REALLY appealing to teenagers and kids 

[TheDuke]

How is that Being The Elite show doing on YouTube with younger people? I don't like it, but maybe that's the primary future of wrestling? Maybe Miro should be doing some AEW/wrestling show on Twitch? Maybe WWE needs to make a deal with Bad Bunny to have wrestling on his social media? I know Quibli died last year, but maybe theres a better way to provide wrestling matches that people can watch on their phones? Maybe people who wouldnt watch an entire episode of Raw or Dynamite might be more likely to watch one or two individual matches on their phones on a regular basis. I already just PVR the shows and fast forward the matches and segments I'm not interested in. One step further is just to let people pick the individual matches they want to watch.

[Loss]

I don't know if YouTube has demos for its viewers.

[sek69]

7 minutes ago, Loss said:

I don't know if YouTube has demos for its viewers.

Each channel has access to their own stats in terms of location/age/gender. I'm sure someone in Google has a master list, but any individual channel owner can see who and where is watching their content. Its why WWE went all in on India since something crazy like 70% of their Youtube views come from there.

I've heard other creators mention they can see the age range of who watches their videos too. 

[blueminister]

On 2/26/2021 at 2:47 PM, joeg said:

Yeah I've talked about it else where on the board. The wrestling business has done very little in the last 20 years to appeal to young people, women or people of color.

Some variation of this has been said, maybe by yourself, in a couple of other threads and I can't help but think that it's a counterfactual. Wrestling has done more to reach out to women and minorities in the last five years than at any time I've been aware of pro wrestling. That this hasn't lead to any sort of new wave of politically-satisfactory commercial success and that the audience has continued to shrink is just something people need to deal with. The hackneyed narrative that they're leaving money on the table not marketing to [marginalized group] needs to be put to bed, as wrestling's problems are much bigger.

[sek69]

Well the indy boom (pre COVID anyway) had a pretty substantial increase of LGBTQ+ and minority wrestlers out there that helped draw from bases wrestling not only usually would not market to but sometimes go out of their way to drive away.

People still have it stuck in their minds that all wrestling = WWE and just because they are driving away fans at record numbers that it means pro wrestling in general is.