>>12728620AEW is a company that should be closing the gap towards profitability but is instead just losing more and more money and more importantly market share. It will only get worse as stars like Darby, Starks, Toni Storm, etc, sign long term extensions with big raises that will effectively cancel out any TV rights increases.
The AEW audience has far more WWE fans than vice versa, so WBD has a much lower incentive to keep them on to retain cable/streaming subscribers. WBD only really needs them for ads.....which don't sell nearly as well with all the blading, curse words, lack of female/family-friendly content and so on.
The company can be fixed but not by signing more yummy free agents to debut to a 3/4 empty NBA arena. They need more stars like MJF wrestling higher-frequency and shorter matches, interacting with the crowd, and creating viral moments. Less flippy/high-paced/choppa-choppa matches and more psychology.
The result: without heavily investing in overseas marketing and promotion (need on-payroll announce teams for minimum 10+ languages, subtitles in another 20+), the company will just continue to sink. Wrestling as a whole is a shrinking market due to the balkanization of the entertainment landscape - what keeps WWE growing is the saturation into international markets. AEW can't do this nearly as well because the product is largely flat and boring outside of the in-ring action.
