This is the follow-up to what I started last week where I will be keeping track of my viewing time of WWE Monday Night Raw, ECW, TNA, and WWE Smackdown over the period of several months to see if I’m able to tell anything about the direction of the quality of the programming (e.g. am I watching less, more, or about the same).
I just have the data for the week this time. I had intended on having a couple of additional charts to show trends from week to week, but I haven’t quite figured out how to display that yet. I thought I would just do a line chart with the data points for each week, but it comes out looking like a mess. It might be a bit before I find the best way to display it, so for now I’ll just show the numbers for the current week.
For the week of 7/14/08
Time To First Match (wk of 7/14/08)
Quite a reversal this week, with Raw going from 28 minutes to 4 minutes until they showed their first match, and TNA going from 2 minutes last week to 18 minutes. (I’m counting the brawl on the ramp between Shawn Michaels and Chris Jericho as the first match for Raw. Otherwise it would be 7 mins).
TNA did have a Pay-Per-View the Sunday before, and there is probably a correlation between that and spending the first part of the program on non in-ring activities.
Percentage of Episode Viewed (wk of 7/14/08)
For the actual viewing time, I switched the chart to show it as a percentage instead of minutes, so I don’t have to scale the ECW totals since it is a one hour program. I’m assuming 100% is 90 minutes for the 2 hr shows, and 45 minutes for the 1 hr ECW.
RAW, ECW, and Smackdown viewing went up a bit, and TNA came down. Raw had less filler at the start, TNA had more, and Smackdown had a couple of decent matches (see below) which would account for the change.
This weeks highlights…
Raw Highlights:
- Kofi Kingston match
ECW Hightlights:
- Evan Bourne
- Hardy’s
TNA Highlights:
- Kaz vs. Petey Williams
Smackdown Highlights:
- Kendrick vs. Yang
- Umaga vs. Kennedy
I agree with you. Some shows(most) and a lot of other programs have a lot of worthless fillers. If they had lots of complaints, some changes might be made.
The problem is content is expensive.
As a related example: American gladiators has what, 6 stunts done per hour show, most lasting only 1 minute? But it’s a 60 minute show… The cost of doing an hour of stunts is huge, considering the variation they throw it. Thus, noise instead of good stuff.
The thing is, at least a few years ago the spikes in the ratings for the wrestling programs were always while somebody was on the mic(I think they get ratings numbers in quarter hours).
With a few exceptions, I rarely want to hear somebody cut a 10 minute promo, but there are apparently enough people that do. My guess is that the spikes were more likely from people flipping channels.
They can get in a rut where if something worked to increase ratings then more of it must be good.