Views From The Turnbuckle: Network Troubles, Huge Indie Show, Sasha Banks, TLC Preview And More

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-Sasha Banks winning the Women’s Championship for the third time just seems like such an awkward way to book things by WWE. Traditionally you would want to build-up a wrestler by having them chase the championship for a while before their journey culminating in a thrilling victory. Banks has a much different story, while she wins the championship frequently, she can never hold on to it, losing cleanly multiple times after winning the title. The issue, and this is somewhat similar to what WWE does with Roman Reigns, is that you can’t crown someone as a big star multiple times. Each time Banks wins the title only to lose it soon after it brings her a step down. The only way it may make sense is if Banks turns heel, and considering she certainly acts like a heel whenever she interacts with Bayley, that might be for the best.

-One of the more peculiar philosophies of WWE is that they feel the need to always beat stars whenever they are in their hometown. Maybe they think it is too predictable to have wrestlers always win in front of their home audience; but it kills the audience. Case in point on Monday night when Cedric Alexander was getting a good reaction from the crowd in Charlotte. The cruiserweight division is dying for reactions like that; so of course Alexander lost which just decimates the audience. Charlotte would of course lose later that night again in front of her hometown audience. I felt the same way when they beat Sasha Banks at Hell in a Cell (which looks even worse now that Sasha has the title again) when she was getting a special reaction from the Boston audience. The beat her clean and the crowd walks out of the arena with no idea what just happened.

-Brandon Howard of Fightful.com who does great work diving into business numbers posted an interesting article that detailed what WWE PPV buys would look like if the Network didn’t exist. Howard used Google search metrics to determine the interest of each PPV and correlated that with a prospective number of buys. It isn’t a perfect measurement but has proven in the past to be accurate in predicting the PPV purchase numbers for UFC events. The numbers are very interesting, with the main assumption becoming that WWE is losing a lot of money with the WWE Network. Even though a much larger audience is watching the events now, PPV still looks like a much more lucrative outlet right now. Dave Meltzer did some more number crunching and came up with an estimation that, combined with the cannibalization of the home video market, the Network has cost WWE about $20 to $25 million in potential profits. They will never scrap the Network because they can’t go back in time, but for the big events, particularly WrestleMania, the business model is deeply flawed. It also doesn’t help that WWE told stock holders they expected to have 3 to 4 million subscribers to the Network by now and they don’t even have half that.

-Insane Championship Wrestling, an indie company out of Scotland held their annual Fear and Loathing event back on 11/20 and it drew …

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