Lessons from Mayweather/McGregor
By Scott Keith on 27 August 2017
Hey Scott,
What can the WWE learn from last night’s record breaking event?
Conor and Floyd single handedly managed to break the PPV record with just a few months of serious promotion. What made people willing to pay a $100 to order this uneventful card? And what can the WWE to promote the same thing? Aside from Wrestlemania, there is rarely a big event feel for their matches yet MMA and boxing manage to pull it off every once in a while.
Does this kill the “PPV is dead” mentality that has been popping up?
Now now, we don't actually KNOW that they broke the record yet, although signs are certainly pointing that way. And the whole "PPV is dead" mentality was only a fallacy promoted by the WWE itself so they could get out of paying PPV companies and promote the Network. UFC and boxing are still doing fine on PPV. The thing is that no matter how big a wrestling match you promote, there's always a ceiling of how big it can get, just by the nature of being WWE. The biggest match ever promoted, Rock v. Cena, did over a million buys, but there's no bigger match they're gonna find just by the nature of being wrestling. A wrestler can go to UFC and draw a crossover audience to increase UFC's buyrate, but UFC fans aren't buying a wrestling show and that's been proven many times.