Does AEW Make Money?

Do you think AEW is profitable? Let us know in the comments!
SHOCK AEW Money Loss?! WWE DESTROY AEW In Survivor Series Ticket Sales! | WrestleTalk
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Written by: Luke Owen
Presented by: Luke Owen
Thumbnail by: Brandon Syres
Image Sourcing by: Brandon Syres

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[WrestleTalk]

LUKE: Do you think AEW is profitable? Let us know in the comments!
- - -
Written by: Luke Owen
Presented by: Luke Owen
Thumbnail by: Brandon Syres
Image Sourcing by: Brandon Syres

[RADPENCILS]

I felt like this when WWE did it and I’ll say it now that AEW is doing it: running he same markets over and over again puts a strain on the audience. There’s only so much an audience can budget for live events and you have to be picky on which ones to attend. People in Chicago probably can’t make it to every AEW show which seems like 3 per year.

[ReviewerRandom]

Wrestletalk: "We're tired of wrestling tribalism, is so dumb; people should stop doing that".

Also Wrestletalk: "Let's put WWE DESTROY AEW" in ALL CAPS in our video title.

[MrMario-tcsl]

I do think that AEW has conditioned Chicago to be complacent with getting shows that they don't need to go to shows all the time. It's there 8 or 9 times a year.

[omoladeadegbayibi]

The whole point cody made when they set the price for ppv was because its only four a year but since more ppvs are being made now they should reduce the price depending on the how many ppvs they want to set

[BlackHoleEye]

Luke, Epic Games had nothing to do with the development of Fight Forever. The game uses their launcher for online games on PC. Which means the money he "invested" into Epic Games was on top of development costs to Yukes and marketing costs and isn't really going to make him any money back, unless he actually bought stock in Epic Games.

[josephotoole]

There's a quote in "Citizen Kane" that may apply to this situation. When confronted that his newspaper is losing $1million a year Charles Kane replies "You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year....At that rate I'll have to close this place in 60 years." TK has access to enough money that having one year or even five years of not making a profit won't hurt him or the business.

[TheMegaDudeBroski]

AEW has made Chicago their second home. Genuinely, look at the concentration of ppvs, major tv episodes, and just general shows and where they take place and there are so many in Chicago. In some ways, it was a smart decision as Chicago is one of the big wrestling cities in the US and building that rabid audience and showcasing how into it they are can create an aura to audiences watching at home that “this is what an AEW crowd is” But when you look at this year, we’re (I live in Chicago so I’ll just refer to it as a paying member of that market) guaranteed to get All Out & Thanksgiving shows, on top of the usual week in late winter/early spring that they do an potentially another show on top of all that. It’s created a sense of, “well I’ll go to All Out but I can easily miss thanksgiving because I already saw them once recently.” Compare that to WWE who usually do either a Raw or SmackDown episode and potentially one PLE here a year. All of a sudden it’s a question of “do I want to go to an episode of Dynamite and Rampage or do I want to go to Survivor Series and see all of the big PLE matches?” It’s a mixture of WWE stepping their game up in the face of some competition, which in turn has given them the hottest product they’ve had in ages, a market that has been conditioned to know around what time of year they will get to see AEW, and the AEW product going through a bit of an identity crisis in the wake of Punk. I think AEW will do just fine, and I see them making some decisions that point to them rediscovering what makes them special and sticking around for quite a time to come, but it is certainly worth noting this as an indicator of how close and how far AEW and WWE are from each other.

[sadboi]

Businesses the size of AEW rarely see profit in the early years, so 5 years in isn't shocking to me.
I think they really need to sort out the streaming service deal and the ppv price situation. Their ppv prices were justifiable when there were only 4 a year but now we have 8 this year and likely even more next year..
It's just too much money. A package deal would really help the buys go up

[ryanmarshall]

I’ve been loving these deep-ish dives in to the business side of wrestling. It helps give some ideas as to decisions being made on creative fronts, as well as just being interesting as hell to me.

[diabeticman]

I’m loving the recent deep dives, if I am to give one critique I do miss the NXT one minute one takes, wish it would come back, especially with Deadline coming up soon

[aimeevanderheyden]

While the decision to move from WWE Network to Peacock has annoyed some, I like having the PLE's there. I already have a subscription so I can watch and not feel like I'm investing a lot of money to watch WWE. On the flip side of that AEW is all PPV, requiring you to pay the $50 each time. For me it comes down to the card, if there's only one or two matches I'm interested in, spending the money doesn't seem worth it for the cost.

[BeastSlayer]

WWE stopped caring about their product quality once they bought out WCW. Once they became the only game in town, it didn’t matter how bad the shows would become, since they were the only wrestling promotion on national US television for a few years and TNA never quite picked up enough steam to actually reach a point where they were challenging WWE directly. Wrestling promotions don’t generally change unless something forces them to. They will ride what works into the ground and then beat that dead horse until it’s bone fragments and scraps of leather.

[luisinncd]

Another day where the NXT review is skipped. STOP IT! It is just one minute!

[danielj]

I used to buy every PPV for AEW even if I knew I couldn't watch it because of work. Now there are way too many PPVs....

[pwnswoggle]

I’m sorry but I’ve been in the video game industry for 11 years and none of what you said about the game industry can be true. First of all, Tony investing 20m into Epic has nothing to do with Yukes or THQ or Fight Forever, it’s a separate investment. Also Fight Forever is built on Unreal Engine 4, which is obviously owned by Epic and can’t be licensed out by AEW. Yukes would have modified the engine but they can’t sell that either because the code is owned by Epic. The deal with THQ just means that AEW can fish for another publisher for the next game and own the rights to “Fight Forever” as a game franchise itself. When you sign a publishing deal there is usually a condition where the publisher has “next to rights”, this just sounds like AEW put up enough of their own collateral to not sign a deal with that condition. This has absolutely nothing to do with the engine and they absolutely do not own any part of that engine, even with a 20m investment, Epic is owned by tencent.

[blackphillip]

“Shock AEW money loss”

Are you joking me? 😂

[OllieRodriguez]

*WT News FeedBack: Personally I prefer the usual videos covering several stories mixed in with segments style videos. However I wouldn't say I don't like these newer/focused videos and might prefer if they became "deep Dives" of a story in the daily roundup. For example the news releases at 1pm giving a round up of the news, then if there's more to a story we get these type of videos that explore the subject more at 3pm (if there's not a review podcast). Overall I'm not upset with this change and appreciate WT for always trying new things 😊♥️

[suhailajaz]

Hate this new format. Been watching wrestletalk for years and the one thing i used to love is that it gave me a rundown of all the news that happened during the day, which is what a news show is supposed to do. This format begs to stop watching the video within two minutes as it goes on and on and on about just one thing. If it was done as a second video, then id be down for it.

[michealdeguzman]

I found this video the be very informative and Luke you’re amazing as always, the biggest takeaway I got from this video though are the following:

Tony has deep pockets, invest now yea but until a profit is returned it’s a non factor.

AEW continues to draw less and less of a live crowd, Tony can invest in whatever he wants but he can’t seemingly lead a horse to water..

People, Fans are what makes wrestling. Perhaps, just perhaps in my opinion if I may. Tony should stop trying to stick his finger in every pie, and focus on what’s important; Wrestling.

So often now it feels leading into every AEW PPV there’s less and less of a build, everything feels very gung ho backstage and it’s not looking good.

What worked best in 2019 isn’t being implemented now in 2023, nobody’s going to the shows anymore.. nobody even plays the game. THQ Nordic wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole if they weren’t being paid as much as they were to help run it, investing in Epic Games is as good as a Fortnite Skin.

Maybe Kenny Omega to Fortnite confirmed?