Nick Aldis Says Loyalty To Jeff Jarrett Led Him Back To TNA In 2015
NWA Worlds Champion Nick Aldis recently spoke to Graham Mirmina of Daily DDT. You can see the full interview at this link, and check out some submitted highlights below.
DDT: Do you feel the pros outweigh the cons of social media in wrestling nowadays?
Aldis: I think that’s all dependent on how you use it and how you utilize it and what you put stock in. Yes, the ability to reach your particular audience and monetize them is huge. It’s a great situation for a smaller startup company like ours because we can target and find the audience we resonate with. Where I think people get off on the wrong exit is it becomes a very inaccurate barometer of public opinion.
I can tell you for a fact that TNA and in particular Dixie [Carter] had a hugely disproportionate view of what the Twitter conversation represented in the wider audience because they represented at the time one-third of our overall audience.
About one of the other thirds of that audience is we had at our peak where we were doing two million viewers was kind of what I was talking about people were the fans that used to watch WCW who, for whatever reason, weren’t WWE fans and they didn’t like that product and they found something different and they liked it and we had them.
Around 2010-2011, the product told them “All that stuff you liked that made TNA unique? You don’t want that anymore.” And we lost them. We never got them back. Twitter is very easy to manipulate to make it look like you’re doing better than you really are. “Look, we’re trending!”
It’s really not that hard to be trending in any given moment if there’s really not much else going on. All you have to do is something stupid or say something controversial and chances are you’ll be trending, you know what I mean?
It’s not equally converted to Pay-Per-View buys and merchandise buys and things like that. What it can do is maintain loyalty with a portion of our audience is creates a false sense of security and a bit of a pathway to laziness and that’s certainly what happened with IMPACT.
DDT: What was your motivation behind returning to IMPACT for that brief stint in 2015?
Aldis: Well, the short stint, it was never a contract. It always just a negotiated thing where they’d pay me this much and I’d go and do it. I knew Jeff [Jarrett] was having problems and I knew it was a chance for him to get back on the saddle and I believed he deserved to run the company and take on that product. I did it out of loyalty to Jeff.
I don’t what the reality of the situation was, but at the time there were three things that factored into my decision to go back. One, the money was decent. Two, it was a favor to Jeff. And three, at the time it was implied it was a pathway for me to do the World of Sport show with ITV.
We even got as far as me walking out and doing a press conference with ITV and World of Sport. We were supposed to be working together and I don’t know how all of that changed and how all of that blew up, but honestly, I felt like I was used like a bargaining chip in that and they were also using that as a way to entice me and come on be on IMPACT as well.
There was some dishonesty there, but I don’t where it fell apart, hence why I never signed a contract and I was just kind of going show by show and it was an option for me to work with Alberto [El Patron]. I’d always admired him and wanted to work with him and so that was the final thing before I said, “Okay, cool, I’ll come in and work with Alberto, that’s fine.” And that was that.
