Hello there, my very good friends, Andy here for What Culture, and today we are talking about what

might be a bit of an under-discussed under-the-radar WW-Problem that I've seen mentioned on social

media in fits and starts, but not on a wide scale, certainly not enough to capture the

imaginations of the wider wrestling fandom, if you will. This kind of sparked up last week

when WW were in Salt Lake City, Utah for Smackdown, and they drew just 4,226 fans, according

to Resseltics who track all of these things in the US, Canada and sometimes abroad as well.

Now, that sounds like quite a low number for the market leading wrestling promotion that is in the

midst of something of a business boom. The company is more profitable than ever before.

Attendances have generally been, generally been purported to be positive. They're making money all over the place.

They're doing really well.

On the balance sheet, of course.

So when you hear that an attendance is startlingly low, you might be a little bit surprised.

Now, a single attendance on its own doesn't really mean a whole lot, right?

You can take any show out of context

and present this number as a singular thing and if you draw conclusions from it, you're probably

going to be wrong because this show of 4,000 people might be flanked by a bunch of shows that

did 10, 12, 13,000 people. So in isolation, yeah, it's not the nicest number in the world, but as part of a wider trend, it doesn't mean a whole lot.

It's far healthier in these situations to look at those wider trends and see actually if there's any kind of problem here or if it's much ado about nothing.

That's what I've done today. I've spent an hour or so going through the data,

compiling attendances for the past couple of years of WW programming, using such sources as

wrestle ticks, as the wrestling observer, as wrestlenomics were required, and assembled some

interesting data points here. And I think the conclusions actually hint at something pretty interesting across the board.

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