Sell TV over PPV?

It’s commonly known that the point of booking wrestling TV is to sell the PPV, which WWE still does considering the last four weeks have featured every conceivable six man tag match combination in order to get people to pay to see Money in the Bank.

But is anybody actually ordering the Network for the individual PPVs? I want to see Cena-Styles, but I’m going to watch the NBA tonight and MITB tomorrow because I have the Network… And I would do the exact same thing if Cena were wrestling a turd because I have the Network.

At the same time, I never watch Raw, but if I knew the main event of Raw was going to be Cena vs. Styles, I’d tune in for sure. And I imagine that would help boost their overall ratings rather than having a meaningless tag match or interview headline the show every single week.

In the Network era, would it make more sense for WWE to build up some of their bigger matches for TV rather than wasting them on a group that is already paying them no matter what they put on PPV?

​Yeah, the Network era is weird, man. Since they’re essentially abandoned PPV, it makes less and less sense to do things the old way. You can bet that they’re gonna hype the shit out of Smackdown for the first 6 weeks and deliver some big stuff there. I might even watch on Hulu! Plus, as we’ve talked about before, there’s no reason for Network shows to be over three hours if they’re not in a set 3 hour block for PPV. Really, two hours is plenty, especially at $9.99 a month. They can keep the guys like Sheamus and Ziggler on TV to fill all THAT time.
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