>>11995651Some people have commented elsewhere on this as some sort of bizarre gotcha moment, which is a great example of the kind of tribalism that so many of us detest. Essentially criticizing AEW for doing exactly what they were being called out for needing to do.
WWE is undoubtedly hot right now and selling tickets - especially to PPV and SmackDown - in phenomenal numbers. RAW is excellent, and House Shows are fairly strong. Kudos to them; they've earned it and it's been a long time coming.
AEW's live attendance is down for non-PPV shows. To some degree, this reflects momentum they lost late last year and early this, as live attendance lags that pretty reliably. . The TV ratings, social media engagement and PPV buys demonstrate that the audience is consistently there that the shows should be selling better. .
So here we see a major personality working for AEW a) promoting an upcoming show in the local market, still several weeks away b) while highlighting attractive ticket prices to c) a crowd of local, hardcore wrestling fans, who seemed rather please about the information. Literally doing what they should be doing, especially since the type of local promotion they've started doing in the last couple of weeks for most shows suggests that they don't currently have the budget allocated to advertising that they probably need in this fiscal year. (Business operations lag business needs).
People like to rag on the BOGO ticket pricing. This is ridiculous. It's wonderful when you can draw fans the way that WWE is doing now, or that AEW was doing two years ago. But WWE used this same tactic for years to sell tickets to house shows and weekly TV pre-pandemic - where do you think these ex-WWE back office guys now working for AEW learned it from? They use BOGO specifically instead of halving the ticket price, because it's proven that people are more likely to buy multiple tickets with this strategy than just lowering the price.
