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Eric Bischoff On What Ted Turner Was Concerned With In WCW

January 2, 2020 | Posted by Joseph Lee

In an interview with Wrestling Inc, Eric Bischoff spoke about what Ted Turner worried about in regards to WCW when he was in charge, and Bischoff’s first impressions upon arriving. Here are highlights:

On Ted Turner and ratings: “Going back to the beginning of WCW, if you read anything about Ted Turner, Ted believed three things that could get eyeballs to his fledgling cable network, WTBS in Atlanta, was professional wrestling, baseball and Andy Griffith. He believed those three things would create a great foundation to build a viewing audience so ratings were always important.”

On his first impression with WCW: “At one point, when I first got to WCW, the consensus amongst many of the employees, talent included, was that Turner wasn’t as concerned with WCW making a profit as it was making a good television product. That’s not really true, but there was certainly an element, I think, within the early WCW business plan that as long as it was drawing eyeballs, that was first and foremost, and profitability was probably second. That changed over the course of the years and probably by the time I got there. The financial situation was much more of a focus along with ratings.”

On the 18-49 demographic: “The 18-49 demo has always been the cornerstone to professional wrestling and the ads sales business. It’s not until the last couple of years that it becomes a focus within the wrestling news sites. The 18-49 was always the key demo. That’s what you’re looking for. That’s your core audience. Once you break 49 years old, there’s not a lot of advertisers that are looking for those demos so the value of those demos trails significantly. I can also tell that kids demo was always very important to WCW early on because we believed that without a kids demo you can’t build a solid licensing and merchandising demo. That’s proven not so much to be true, but at that time the kids demo was just as important to us in some ways to 18-49-year-old males because the kids demo was a valuable target for advertisers.”

On ratings in the 90s: “Back in the day, when I was very involved in the business side of the wrestling business, there were boxes, little black boxes, that the Nielsen company would distribute around various markets around the United States and people would volunteer to have these boxes in their home attached to their television. That box would track what viewers were watching along with information that the subscriber or volunteer, in this case, would submit to Nielsen, and they kind of just extrapolated all that information and came up with a national Nielsen rating and to my knowledge, it’s pretty much done the same way today.”

On the crossover between RAW and Nitro: “I don’t think anybody really knows. I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody with any firsthand knowledge, research or experience been able to figure that out. I think my gut tells me that I’ve always believed the crossover is probably closer to 25-35 percent would be my guess. I used to always refer to it as duplication as opposed to crossover. I think you may have in a given quarter-hour 25-30 percent of your people bouncing back and forth during that quarter-hour. I don’t think it was any more than that but even that’s a significant number. It’s just a gut instinct than anything else but what’s interesting is that even if you take that number to let’s say eight million people and you reduce that by two million people just to account for the crossover or duplication of audience you still got six million people watching wrestling on a Monday night, whereas now I don’t think you’ve got six million people in total if you add up RAW Smackdown AEW NXT together. I’m not sure if you can crack 6 million. Maybe?”

On television: “I think that television, five years from now, will be in the same category as Blockbuster; wow, remember when everybody had one. Remember when there was a Blockbuster in every street corner. The way people consume music, the way people consume entertainment, it evolved so rapidly over the last five years, over the last three years really. I mean Martin Scorcese is now releasing one of the best films of the year, probably, on Netflix. Martin Scorsese, I mean come on. You would never imagine that a couple of years ago, and now it’s happening. I think television, as we know it today, is gonna go by the wayside. I think there’s always gonna be some big monitor on the wall but what’s feeding that monitor 10 years from, now five years from now, is gonna look a lot different than it does today.”

article topics :

Eric Bischoff, Joseph Lee