All right, welcome to talk is Jericho. It's the pot of thunder and rock and roll. It's officially the last weekend of summer. Oh no. So please let's send it off with a bang with the deaf Macagan joke of the week.

Quick Jericho, deaf Macagan cone. Listen, Audi is coming out with a new car just for cowboys. It's called the Audi partner. Thank you very much to buy another. Well, I guess we call it a classic from Duff. He's in South America with guns and roses. Hopefully cultivating and harvesting more jokes. Their tour started up again yesterday. They'll hit Mexico, Asia, Australia and New Zealand before the year is over.

And don't forget about Chris Jericho's rock and resting rager at sea. The four leaf clover. We are leaving out of Miami on February 2nd to the 6th going all the way to our own special island. Go to Chris Jericho cruise.

Dot com for all lineup and cabin information. We still have cabins left and it's going to be the best vacation. You've ever had vacation of a lifetime. Chris Jericho cruise dot com. All right. Today it's the business of wrestling with Brandon Thurston from Russell.

He's the guy gets all the ratings for AEW and WWE impact the TV shows, YouTube views, social media numbers, pay-per-view numbers, shares them along with data analysis. He charts what every show is doing in terms of audience and demographics and what it means in the big picture of success and growth for each company and the wrestling business in general.

I am of course the demo God. So I look forward to seeing Brandon's reports and breakdowns. I also thought it would be good to let him explain ratings and why so many people watching any given show, Dynamite Rampage Raw or Smackdown is not nearly as important as the demographic breakdown.

He explains the demos and why the age of the viewers is more important than a total audience number. He's also explaining cable rankings and talks about how streaming has really changed the landscape of media consumption and watching habits talks about cable versus streaming why both are important advantages they each have and how it's impacted and changing the future of wrestling live TV shows and how shows and pay-per-view events.

Brandon also has some predictions about future WWE TV deals and AEW's next TV deal and how AEW's next TV deal could really shake up the wrestling business overall.

He's got info and thoughts on the WWE network shutting down and moving to peacock. He's talking about AEW's potential for streaming and what might happen if any of the big tech companies Amazon Prime, Apple or Netflix decide they want the streaming rights to Dynamite, Raw or Smackdown.

Fascinating conversation with Brendan Thurston starting right here right now on Talk Is Jericho.

So I called myself the demo god not just as a catchy name but for a reason because I really since AEW started got into the whole ratings and the demos of Dynamite and NXT and WWE.

So I was always waiting for the ratings every week and some of my friends were getting them before me and it kind of was like how the hell you getting these ratings before me and they said well they were subscribing to WrestleNomics and Brandon Thurston was the name I kept hearing over and over again and that's why I wanted to talk to you today the creator of WrestleNomics, Brandon Thurston is here.

Yeah well the creator actually is Chris Harrington who I think you know.

Is Harrington the creator because he was the guy who was getting the ratings from but later than my friends who were getting them from wherever you were getting them from?

Yeah no he created this WrestleNomics brand which I think is a cool name. He was doing podcasts and wrestling business research and things like that going way back but he started using the name in 2013.

He even had some of his early podcasts he did with Brody with Brody Lee. I was vaguely aware of him because you know as I call him Mookie he was doing some indie stuff and he knew a lot of indie wrestlers including Brody and Colin Delaney and people like that so he moved away from Rochester about 2005 or so and moved to Minnesota but we knew a lot of the same people and as WWE Network was being launched I was really interested in that and to see how a new form of media was going to change the wrestling business

because I think that's a really common recurring theme is how different new forms of media have continually changed the wrestling business but when the network was getting launched I was reading a lot of his work and you know I was starting to do some writing on the wrestling business myself and that's how we came to know each other.

Mookie yeah yeah because you're up from the Buffalo area right?

Right yeah I've always lived in Buffalo because Danny Garcia actually mentioned your name when we did talk as Jericho as well you trained with him or trained him or were you actually in the wrestling business prior to being a huntificator shall we say?

Yeah no I've been an independent wrestler since 2003 so I was 18 years old so when when Daniel came around we have a school called Brapler's Anonymous and I was training helping people training there from about 2015 to at the beginning of the pandemic

I stopped going right early but yeah it's Mikey every night myself in Pepper Park so I would say we're his original trainers yeah we train him the basics and you know psychology and how to put a match together he's somebody who's who stood out right away as especially if you can imagine a younger scruffier looking down Garcia

he might not on F first glance look like somebody who's gonna become a signed wrestling star but once you got to know him and you know worked with him I think there's a lot of qualities not just his wrestling ability but who he is as a person and how he conducts himself as a person that make it pretty clear to me that he's he was gonna go places

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