Tony Khan on How AEW Can Grow Its Audience as the TV Landscape Changes

– AEW President & CEO Tony Khan spoke on growing AEW’s audience during Thursday’s media conference call for Double or Nothing 2022. Below are some highlights (via Fightful):

Khan on how you grow AEW’s fanbase: “It’s probably one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves, ‘How do you grow a fanbase, especially as the TV landscape changes?’ For us, we’ve been able to get great audiences supporting Dynamite and Rampage. The best thing we’ve been able to do — the pay-per-view numbers have been great and they’ve been able to grow and grow, which is exactly what you want to see where every pay-per-view event has had year over year growth, that’s the best trend you can have. To continue that kind of growth, the best thing we can do is continue developing and, I don’t want to say nurturing because this is a hard sport and people are beating the hell out of each other, so I don’t know if nurturing is the right word, but continuing to develop, and take care of, and treat the wrestlers well and have a company where young wrestlers are going to want to sign up and learn and get better to where this is going to be the home of the best young wrestler, but also continuing to recruit in free agency.”

Tony Khan on how free agent pickups can help AEW: “Similar to sports, where, in English Football, you want the best academy and also do great in the transfer market or in the NFL where you want to do well in the draft and get great young players in, but also you need to recruit from the outside and in free agency. It’s a mix of them and by getting the big names in that we’ve had in the past year, adding some of the top names in the sport like CM Punk, Bryan Danielson, Adam Cole, Ruby Soho and Toni Storm, who have been very influential in the Owen Hart Tournament. Now we’ve had Jeff Hardy join Matt Hardy and they are in a big match with the Young Bucks. Continuing to develop and find new homegrown stars to wrestle against and with top stars coming in as free agents who have established themselves at big promotions all over the world, that bodes really well for us. There is also the potential to hit new outlets. We’re a really strong TV product and there other revenue streams and opportunities to put new eyeballs on AEW through streaming service and that’s one of the exciting things about having a media partner who is the biggest creator of content on the planet in Warner Brothers Discovery as our partner, side by side, to work on this.”