“You can have the best product in the world…but if nobody knows where you’re at, they ain’t watching it.â€â€”Tommy Dreamer
A story that I’ve wanted to write about for around a month now is the recent stories indicating that Ring of Honor’s venture into the pay-per-view market hasn’t been what they’ve wanted it to be. Despite each PPV being a card of the year candidate, the final numbers have shown that only the die-hard’s are ordering the shows. In Canada, where ROH programming is on The Fight Network, one outlet estimated the number of buys for a recent PPV at “a couple dozen.†In reaction to this, Gabe Sapolsky and others in charge in ROH have made changes including the abrupt halt to Daniel Puder’s tryout, less fly-ins for talent, and reconsideration on the shows themselves. Truly, this is a harsh reality for the #1 Indy promotion in the U.S., but still not a fatal one.
P.C. Says: Advertising is ROH’s biggest problem
Tommy Dreamer’s quote is one that probably best describes why Indy promotions are Indy promotions and why The E and TNA are the U.S.’s Big Two of pro wrestling. T.V. and pay-per-view is where it’s at in the U.S. because if you’re not where the populous can see you then you have to rely on your true believers to always be there—something that most Indy promotions actually can rely on.
When ROH first made the announcements that they were to begin showing events on pay-per-view, they consistently kept saying that they would “now be available in 50 million homes.†While the number is what most people saw—or what ROH wanted most people to see—the word that everyone should’ve looked at was available. Yeah, they’re available in 50 million homes, but that doesn’t mean that 50 million people are watching it (how’s that for a buyrate?). I was one of the people who didn’t pay attention to this qualifying word and thus was surprised at first at how bad the buy numbers actually were.
However, one thing that is THE contributing factor to these low numbers is the fact that only ROH fans know ROH is on pay-per-view. Yes there have been some advertisements, but nothing near the kind of marketing needed for an Indy promotion to actually get respectable buys. If you’re not on T.V. every week, people are likely not going to know you exist or would need some reminder of that fact. So, all Indy feds that would be in the position ROH is in should have come to this realization. Even in Canada, where ROH is on T.V., the fans there have basically made the decision that they’d rather watch older ROH shows than buy the current product for an additional $15 a pop in addition to the subscription fees for The Fight Network. Hey, can’t have everything I guess.
In short, they’ve got the product, they’ve got their base, they have a very economical price for the shows, and they’ve got the talent to make this thing work, now they just have to get word out to the people.
The Reality is…they are still the kings of the Indy world. Even if the PPV experiment turns out to be a complete failure (from a financial standpoint that is), they can at least say that they tried. No other Indy fed in the country—even PWG—would have the stones to try PPV for their product, but because ROH has exponentially more momentum and hype to their promotion than others, they were at least warranted this try. I look at it this way: I’ve bought every one of ROH’s PPV’s and if TNA fucks up Joe’s current push, you can be guaranteed I’ll have even more money to spend on ROH. Keep up the good work because even if the experiment doesn’t end up being anything, you’ve been able to whether worse storms before, I have full faith that you could do it again.
