WWE and papering stadiums

Hey Scott,

A lot of talk lately on the blog about WWE giving out free tickets to fill up big stadiums. Silly question but how do you go about getting those free tickets? I mean, why would anyone pay $2500 to go to WrestleMania if you can go for free and sit in the upper deck? Is that what really happens? How exactly do they give them away? And sometimes it seems like they’re giving away tens of thousands of tickets?

​The most popular method has always been to give giant wads of tickets to radio stations to give away. During down periods, you could also just kind of hang around by the arena at showtime and they’d have people giving out tickets to pad the attendance as well. Or another example was the original Survivor Series, where they were going to be well short of a sellout, so they donated something like 5000 tickets to a children’s charity so that they had a full house AND it looked like there was a bunch of kids going to their show. ​