>>17008177I don't get the impression from the numbers we can see, and fairly obviously conclusions to draw from them, that many people are watching on MAX. Like maybe ~60-70k tops.
Their TV numbers are broadly in the ballpark of exactly where they were before streaming began, so either all of the people who left for MAX were conspicuously replaced at THE EXACT SAME TIME by new television viewers, or the number of people who switched to MAX is low enough to basically exist within the pre-MAX ebb and flow of AEW's ratings.
They probably also got some number of NEW viewers on MAX from being there, but realistically how many people do we think that is? We can look at RAW on Netflix for a possible data point on that, and that was with a lot more advertising from Netflix than AEW have gotten on MAX. (It's not a good sign.)
But more than this, it's incredibly conspicuous that AEW and WBD refuse to talk about how it's doing. We've got one internal WBD person who would only talk on background saying it was "among their top live sports programming", which is incredibly non-specific, and that description was later repeated by Tony somewhere once. That's all anyone has said.
Considering Tony's history of blowing the horn the second they have some positive attendance or viewership milestone to mention, does that pass a basic smell test with anyone? And lest anyone try to claim maybe Tony has been chastened on this front or something, he was talking about the viewership numbers in the UK just recently.
