The WWE’s Commercial Conundrum

Picture this: You’re 10 years old. It's a Tuesday night and past your bedtime. You have done the dishes and cleaned the toilet for the honor of staying up to watch your heros, The New Day, defend their Smackdown Tag Titles from the dreaded team known as “The Revival”. Your staring at the soft glow of the television enthralled by every closeline, every hit, every high spot.

Xavier Woods goes to the top ropes. This is it. It has to be the end. He launches himself high above the ring and the crowd to deliver the final blow and end The Revival’s attack on unicorn horns and pancakes across the land. When suddenly, Dash quickly rolls out of the way and Xavier crashes into the mat with a thunderous BANG! Dash quickly picks up and hurls Xavier over the top ropes and onto an unsuspecting Big E. You go with him, thrown from the highest point above the ring all the way down to the arena floor. The fight has turned. What will happen next?

Then, you hear the dreaded words cut through your focus and the roar of the crowd, “...when we return, on Smackdown!”. These words strike fear in the hearts of wrestling fans all over the world. The picture of Xavier Woods and Big E writhing outside the ring as Dash climbs out to finish the job fades to black. What?! What the heck is this?! What is happening?! What am I missing?!

Two minutes later the picture returns and Big E is in the ring, dancing around in joy as Dawson is lying face down, nearly dead in the center of the ring. The disconnect is maddening. Xavier and Dash were the legal men when you saw them last, now it’s Big E and Dawson? What the heck happened?! What did I miss? How did we get here?

The magic has all but disappeared for the 99% of viewers that are not in attendance. All the work that the wrestlers did to build the tension, all the great calls and good sells that the commentators used to support the action and the storyline, all the great shots the camera crew jockeyed to capture and (most importantly) you cleaning that damn toilet are wasted in a matter of a few moments. It’s like hearing a really great song with thirty seconds missing or reading a great book with twenty pages ripped out.

This, in a nutshell, is why both networks and promotions have struggled with commercial breaks for as long as they have been on television. It’s not just the ticket and merchandise sales that keep the lights on and the wheels rolling. The sponsors need to get their share of the viewers time as well; roughly fifteen minutes of every hour.

For most sports, commercials seem to fit naturally into the ebb and flow of the action in their events. Baseball has space between innings and pitching changes. Basketball has timeouts and breaks between quarters. Football seems to have the most opportunities, with timeouts, space between quarters and time between scores to squeeze in those little thirty second spots for coffee and cars and any other thing we just can’t live without.

This would seem to be true for sports entertainment as well. After all, most matches last between 5 and 15 minutes and have a very distinctive beginning, middle and end. But wrestling isn’t just about the matches. There must be a story too. The matches are just the bricks that make up the structure of the wall. The story is the mortar that holds everything together. The feuds give the matches depth and meaning and significance. After all, who really cared who was the better wrestler between Sasha Banks and Natalya before Sasha brilliantly screamed, “Go to hell, Nattie, and tell your daddy I said Hi!” Oh, Damn! Now I want to see who’s gonna get the beating for this one.

But there is no time for story if every second between the matches is filled with adverts for new cars, ED medications, cereal and whatever else is playing on this particular network this week. There has to be a balance.

Earlier this year, Vince McMahon made the decision to outlaw commercials during matches. This choice led to exactly the kind of stuff that WWE wants to avoid: Gimmicky interferences that pull people out of the story and the dreaded ⅔ falls matches that make the first 2 falls a waste of everyone’s time. You may as well put in more commercials if your going to do that stuff. At least the commercials will raise some revenue. He recently made the sound decision to reverse that rule in July, with mixed results. The ultimate goal here should be to avoid the dilution of the product, whether it be by increasing commercial breaks or decreasing the quality of the product to work around them.

It’s clear that the WWE is aware and sympathetic to the fans on this topic. During Monday Night Raw’s first King of the Ring match between Samoa Joe and Cesaro they did have a commercial break; but they left a small picture showing the action with no sound on the screen so viewers could at least follow the action during the commercials. This was better than nothing. However, the King of the Ring tournament has returned after a five year break and has been the biggest product pushed by WWE since Summerslam with previous winners like Booker T and Steve Austin making appearances to comment on the significance of the tournament for both the wrestlers and the fans. Cutting a match down to just a small picture with no sound really diminishes the product.

The vast majority of WWE’s revenue is generated by the TV deals they strike. Those TV deals only get better for WWE when the viewership increases and can only be monetized with the use of advertisers. But the more advertisements they have, the less people are going to watch. This is the delicate balance that the WWE has to maintain to keep things good in the business. Too many commercials means less eyes, and too few commercials means less money. In addition, WWE raises additional revenue with commercials and match sponsorships. Does anyone else get a craving for Skittles every Monday night?

The WWE is at a crossroads with the fan base. Now that fans are getting exposed to the high quality AEW product that Tony Kahn is offering they can choose to go elsewhere on Wednesday nights. In addition, Raw and Smackdown will be measured against the same AEW standard even though they are not going head-to-head like NXT will be on Wednesday. It will be interesting to see if Turner uses a different commercial strategy and how WWE responds.

WWE needs to make a hard choice. They should sacrifice revenue in the short term by limiting commercial breaks the way baseball does in hopes that it will allow them to increase the depth and quality of their product (story) without sacrificing match time and viewer interest. This will inevitably lead to an increase in viewership and drive the value of those viewers up. Sure, they will take a short term hit in revenue because of the decrease in advertisements, but if they use that time to increase the quality of the product, viewers will return and the value of those advertisements will increase and the long game for WWE will be secured once again.