AEW TV - 9/6 - 9/9 - Fearing For Our Collective Safeties

[strobogo]

Has Cornette been right about anything in pro wrestling after 2004 or so? 

[strobogo]

His business model being bitch about the youths EXPOSING DA BIZ for 20 years while making his living off of shoots and podcasts explicitly exposing every possible detail of the business 

[strobogo]

I can not imagine he's one of the highest paid people in wrestling today

[The Thread Killer]

2 hours ago, Cien Caras said:

Well he’s making more money than most in 2023 so he’s doing something right.

Personally as someone who has no interest in modern wrestling I would love his podcast (at least one of them) to be entirely focused on old school and historical discussion but there’s more money in winding up the AEW marks so I can’t fault his business decisions.

You may be in luck, sooner than you think. He was talking on the recent podcast about the fact that he is seriously considering changing up his business model…and soon.

Cornette has already retired from the highly lucrative convention/personal appearance business, because he is basically agoraphobic and hates leaving his house. It has already been established that one of the main reasons he does not work in the actual Pro Wrestling business today is because he now refuses to fly anywhere and if he can’t get somewhere by driving, he will not go. This is why he quit MLW.

The pandemic pretty much triggered his pre-existing germaphobia, so now he is not only at the point where he will not leave the South he won’t even leave Louisville. He has stated that the next thing he wants to eliminate from his life is his memorabilia business. Cornette’s Collectibles has gotten so huge that he can’t run it himself anymore. He has a staff that runs it remotely. But I think just managing that business is aggravating him. He is going to be 65 soon and he wants to retire. He has stated that he will continue to do the podcast because it is too lucrative for him to give up and supplies a good source of income, from which he does not even need to leave his house.

He did however, state recently that he really wants to focus on his archives and there are a couple of books he wants to write about pro wrestling history. If you read between the lines, he has made it pretty clear he is getting tired of reviewing WWE and AEW programming every week, and I think he would like to get back to one podcast (The Jim Cornette Experience) being about current wrestling and the other (Cornette’s Drive Thru) being about pro wrestling history. Essentially, he made it pretty clear that once he has turned 65 he is going to scale way back on a lot of his activities and focus on his archives, writing, and historical podcasting. Which is good for everybody, honestly.

[The Thread Killer]

1 hour ago, strobogo said:

I can not imagine he's one of the highest paid people in wrestling today

He’s hardly rich but he’s not hurting either. Jim Cornette is pretty open about his finances if you listen to his podcasts. He has always said the most money he ever made in the business was $350,000 a year but now he probably makes about $750,000 a year when you combine the income from his podcasts and his memorabilia business. That is not a bad amount of money when you consider the fact he never needs to leave his house to earn it.

[Robert S]

7 hours ago, TheDuke said:

I think Cornette 's point is that the business is not doing that well compared to the boom periods of the 80s and 90s. However I don't know how you can really measure that because the metric of TV ratings really doesn't mean what it used to because all of TV the ratings are down across the board so you can't really compare.

It's more like comparing the business to the territory days with the usual key points being (1) that there were many more people living from professional wrestling back then compared to today and (2) taking a couple of numbers people (I think Ole's income is a common example) were claiming to make back then and putting them through the inflation calculator.

[Robert S]

2 hours ago, The Thread Killer said:

He has stated that he will continue to do the podcast because it is too lucrative for him to give up and supplies a good source of income, from which he does not even need to leave his house.

I have no idea how much money there is in podcasting in 2023 in a niche product like pro wrestling, but listening to the kind of sponsors he has the money can't be huge. I mean Stephen P. New won't spend more than a couple of grand on a podcast add a year, right?

[The Thread Killer]

29 minutes ago, Robert S said:

I have no idea how much money there is in podcasting in 2023 in a niche product like pro wrestling, but listening to the kind of sponsors he has the money can't be huge. I mean Stephen P. New won't spend more than a couple of grand on a podcast add a year, right?

Doesn’t work like that anymore. I think Cornette basically advertises Stephen P. New in exchange for free legal services. The rest is all done through an advertising agency. In Cornette’s case, he actually recently fired his advertising agent because he doesn’t like paying a percentage back in commission, so he is hiring his own advertising sales staff. Conrad Thompson has the same now, that’s why he started that company Podcast Heat.

When Conrad Thompson first started his podcast with Bruce Prichard they actually had to go out and stump for advertisers on their own. Once advertisers saw how many downloads podcasts started to get, and they basically discovered that podcasting was replacing terrestrial radio in a sense, advertising agencies started bundling advertising packages and shopping them to Podcasters, prorating them based on downloads.

Basically the more downloads your podcast gets, the more money an advertiser will pay to advertise on your show. I think it’s somewhat similar to the way YouTube has been monetized, except for it’s a lot more transparent with Podcast advertising. The major Madison Avenue advertising agencies are now shopping advertising to podcasts, the same way they used to do it to TV and radio.

I have mentioned it elsewhere, but Conrad Thompson has been upfront about the fact that the magic number is 300,000 downloads. If your podcast can get more than 300,000 downloads in a week, you are pretty much guaranteed a six-figure advertising contract from a major advertising agency. They will pick the ads, and they will rotate them in and out, you just have to read the copy and rake in the money.

Both of Cornette’s podcasts are consistently the top two Pro Wrestling podcasts on the Apple Pro Wrestling podcast rankings, every week. They both do well over 300,000 weekly downloads.

I only know this, because Conrad Thompson once did a really interesting interview with Sean Oliver where he explained the ins and outs of the  Pro Wrestling podcast business. Thompson did mention that he thinks it’s going to change, and the bubble is going to burst because advertisers are going to start insisting on not just finding out if the podcast has been downloaded, but if it was listened to all the way through. If advertising agencies start insisting on engagement data, this entire model might change.

 

[Jmare007]

12 minutes ago, The Thread Killer said:

Doesn’t work like that anymore. I think Cornette basically advertises Stephen P. New in exchange for free legal services. The rest is all done through an advertising agency. In Cornette’s case, he actually recently fired his advertising agent because he doesn’t like paying a percentage back in commission, so he is hiring his own advertising sales staff. Conrad Thompson has the same now, that’s why he started that company Podcast Heat.

When Conrad Thompson first started his podcast with Bruce Prichard they actually had to go out and stump for advertisers on their own. Once advertisers saw how many downloads podcasts started to get, and they basically discovered that podcasting was replacing terrestrial radio in a sense, advertising agencies started bundling advertising packages and shopping them to Podcasters, prorating them based on downloads.

Basically the more downloads your podcast gets, the more money an advertiser will pay to advertise on your show. I think it’s somewhat similar to the way YouTube has been monetized, except for it’s a lot more transparent with Podcast advertising. The major Madison Avenue advertising agencies are now shopping advertising to podcasts, the same way they used to do it to TV and radio.

I have mentioned it elsewhere, but Conrad Thompson has been upfront about the fact that the magic number is 300,000 downloads. If your podcast can get more than 300,000 downloads in a week, you are pretty much guaranteed a six-figure advertising contract from a major advertising agency. They will pick the ads, and they will rotate them in and out, you just have to read the copy and rake in the money.

Both of Cornette’s podcasts are consistently the top two Pro Wrestling podcasts on the Apple Pro Wrestling podcast rankings, every week. They both do well over 300,000 weekly downloads.

I only know this, because Conrad Thompson once did a really interesting interview with Sean Oliver where he explained the ins and outs of the  Pro Wrestling podcast business. Thompson did mention that he thinks it’s going to change, and the bubble is going to burst because advertisers are going to start insisting on not just finding out if the podcast has been downloaded, but if it was listened to all the way through. If advertising agencies start insisting on engagement data, this entire model might change.

 

That's fascinating, this makes a lot more sense why the podcasting bubble continues to grow. It's also hilarious how companies continue to find ways to throw money at the wall and see what sticks, regardless of how much money they are throwing

[Embrodak]

10 hours ago, strobogo said:

Has Cornette been right about anything in pro wrestling after 2004 or so? 

In my opinion, yes! I also think that poetry, literature, and film, at a minimum, are rather bad compared to their heyday, so I’m basically accepting of criticism that says that there is something important that is absent or done badly in modern media writ large.

[Rah]

Cornette was hyping Rollins as the next big thing in WWE long before anyone I believe (during Seth's RoH time). Whatever we see Rollins as, WWE seems to be on the same kool-aid. 

[Robert S]

23 hours ago, The Thread Killer said:

Both of Cornette’s podcasts are consistently the top two Pro Wrestling podcasts on the Apple Pro Wrestling podcast rankings, every week. They both do well over 300,000 weekly downloads.

Those podcasts do 300.000 downloads? Holy fuck. If you would have asked me, I would have guessed maybe 1/20 of that number.

[The Thread Killer]

2 hours ago, Robert S said:

Those podcasts do 300.000 downloads? Holy fuck. If you would have asked me, I would have guessed maybe 1/20 of that number.

Cornette’s podcasts do more than 300,000 a week. That’s just the download number Conrad listed as being required to make major money. At his height, before he returned to WWE, Bruce Prichard was doing well over 500,000 a week and Cornette’s podcasts beat his. Hell, Steve Austin’s show still does monster download numbers and it is all repeats, he has not recorded a new show in over a year.

Keep in mind, like Conrad pointed out that is just downloads, not the actual engagement numbers. At one point my podcast app was automatically downloading both of Cornette’s podcasts every week, but I rarely listened to the entire thing.

Back when I was a subscriber to Ad Free Shows, Conrad used to do a monthly AMA podcast and it was always fascinating. He would get into the really nitty-gritty of the podcasting business, he talked about advertising rates, production issues, and even the technical specs on their equipment.

[Zoo Enthusiast]

On 9/7/2023 at 9:01 AM, strobogo said:

Christian is great and has always been great, the idea that you'd even have to qualify being a fan as "unironic" is baffling to me.

Jon Moxley might be the most inconsistent dude I've ever seen. Not even from match to match, but from move to move. Guy can go from awesome to the worst you've ever seen match to match, spot to spot, move to move.

Well it’s AEW and half the show is ironic callbacks and stuff at this point.