Royal Rumble 2013 buys

13th March 2013 by Scott Keith
Rants
Hey Scott,
Two emails from me in one day! Lucky you.

Just saw that the first estimates of the Rumble buys are in, and, well…huh.
http://pwtorch.com/artman2/publish/WWE_News_3/article_68911.shtml

Basically it's around 440,000 buys on the low end, or 498,000 on the higher end. Considering that the previous few Rumbles have hovered around 445,000 buys SANS Rock, I can't see how they aren't let down with this. Obviously something on the lower end of that scale is a absolute disaster, but even if they do end up at around a hair under 500,000 I'd assume that's lower than expectations too. I mean, at best, The Rock brought in an extra 50,000 buys for a singles match in which he was guaranteed to win the WWE Title? They had to have been expecting a bigger bump than that.

So assuming the final number ends up being somewhere in that range, what do you think? Should they be overjoyed to have gotten any kind of bump in this day and age? Or is it a disappointment? And if it's the latter, why do you think the show did such a low number: poor build, declining drawing power of The Rock, Punk being a poor opponent, overall decline in the company's popularity? SNITSKY? Whose fault is it?
Later,
-Worst in the World

Yeah, Meltzer was talking about that last night, and it's definitely a crushing disappointment for them. Don't forget too that 500K is the worldwide number, and they make less money off international buys, so the really important number is domestic. And there, Rock only boosted things something like 30K. Normally they'd be like "Yippey! Highest Rumble and highest non-Wrestlemania buyrate in 5 years!" but Rock is getting a FUCK-TON of money to do these matches, and an extra 30,000 buys isn't getting them anywhere near breaking even on the deal. Basically they would have been better off leaving Rock off the show and promoting the hell out of the Rumble match itself. It might have only increased buys a few extra, but they'd make a lot more profit on it.