FITE TV has been a major platform in pro wrestling, and they’re still cashing in on big events that happened over a year ago.
With All Elite Wrestling launching in 2019, it seems people are still interested in seeing the genesis of the company. When speaking with Mike Weber, FITE’s COO, he told Fightful that the pay-per-view buys for the September 2018 All In show are still rolling in.
“I’m still banking quite a bit of money off All In from last September. People are still buying it. It was a great event. They should still buy it. And that’s one of the sort of cool things. Whereas in wrestling you will have people buy the event two days later, day later, or six months later. Boxing, does not happen. Once it happens, it’s over. Nobody cares,” Weber said.
FITE’s experience has shown Weber a lot of the buying habits of combat and wrestling fans. Wrestling content appears more evergreen, while boxing is a buy it that night or not at all type of destination. MMA is a little more difficult.
“Somewhere in between,” Weber said. “You will get people buying it, but it’s closer to boxing than wrestling. Wrestling is a very interesting—you learn a lot doing this stuff. We’ve done 2,500 live events. So, that gives us a lot of advantage. One, practice [doesn’t] makes perfect, so that’s one of the reasons I feel why we have a strong technology model to deliver a good program. And then secondly, we learned how to gauge buyer’s habits. And they’re vastly different between sport to sport. Between boxing and wrestling especially.”
Weber would go into detail a little more, and says that the viewing habits of pay-per-view online actually mimick that of the live viewers and when/how they show up, dependent on sport.
“Boxing, people will be buying up to the 12th round on the main event, and if you’ve ever been to a big top of the heavyweight fight or any big fight, in the [T-Mobile Arena] in Las Vegas—nobody even shows up ‘til the second to last match, two hours into the show. You know every seat’s sold. [Or buy at midnight.] Whereas wrestling, at (AEW PPV) the doors they can open, I think they open at 3 or 4 in the afternoon, there’ll be people eight o’clock in the morning waiting in line for a seat they already have assigned to them. So vastly different and everybody wants to see the very first minute. The viewing habits are exactly the same, in boxing people will buy the main event during the main event—where as wrestling we’ll have thousands of people [buy these events weeks in advance] and actually there’s no technical reason why you have to buy in advance. You just buy it the day of. It’s the same as turn the TV on,” said Weber.
You can see our full conversation with Mike Weber at the top of the page, where he talks about GCW, WCW, All Elite Wrestling, and much more.
