During a recent interview with Fightful, FITE COO Mike Weber noted that last year’s AEW “All In” pay-per-view event is still drawing buys. You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
On AEW All In: “I’m still banking quite a bit of money off All In from last September. People are still buying it. It was a great event. They should still buy it. And that’s one of the sort of cool things. Whereas in wrestling you will have people buy the event two days later, day later, or six months later. Boxing, does not happen. Once it happens, it’s over. Nobody cares.”
On how MMA does in buys compared to boxing and wrestling: “Somewhere in between. You will get people buying it, but it’s closer to boxing than wrestling. Wrestling is a very interesting—you learn a lot doing this stuff. We’ve done 2,500 live events. So, that gives us a lot of advantage. One, practice [doesn’t] makes perfect, so that’s one of the reasons I feel why we have a strong technology model to deliver a good program. And then secondly, we learned how to gauge buyer’s habits. And they’re vastly different between sport to sport. Between boxing and wrestling especially.”
On boxing: “Boxing, people will be buying up to the 12th round on the main event, and if you’ve ever been to a big top of the heavyweight fight or any big fight, in the [T-Mobile Arena] in Las Vegas—nobody even shows up ‘til the second to last match, two hours into the show. You know every seat’s sold. [Or buy at midnight.] Whereas wrestling, at (AEW PPV) the doors they can open, I think they open at 3 or 4 in the afternoon, there’ll be people eight o’clock in the morning waiting in line for a seat they already have assigned to them. So vastly different and everybody wants to see the very first minute. The viewing habits are exactly the same, in boxing people will buy the main event during the main event—where as wrestling we’ll have thousands of people [buy these events weeks in advance] and actually there’s no technical reason why you have to buy in advance. You just buy it the day of. It’s the same as turn the TV on.”
