Professional wrestling, for as much as it had its cultural impact in the 80s to the early 2000s, hasn’t been as popular as it used to be.
It still has popularity, like the premier wrestling brand, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), having streaming deals with Netflix and having large spectacle shows in Saudi Arabia, along with the fast pace and fluid indie wrestling style (flashy and over the top) of All Elite Wrestling (AEW).
But the days of Hulkamania, D-Generation X, and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin are fragments of the popularity of what they used to be during the “Attitude Era”.
During the early 2000s, Monday Night Raw reached almost four million viewers on average. The number has dropped to around a million viewers per Monday Night Raw today.
This high in popularity coincides with students on campus, as a Rowan student, Jacob Apicella, a supply chain and logistics major, noted the trend in popularity of professional wrestling around him growing up.
“I do have a handful of friends who watched it like way back in the early 2000s when it was really big, yeah. But not nowadays,” said Apicella.
One could suggest that the opposing brand to WWE, All Elite Wrestling (AEW), can cater to a new generation of fans with its fast, over-the-top style that may appeal to shorter attention spans. However, that is not the case.
Despite the faster pace, AEW has continued to drop over the past few years. This could be attributed to younger viewers being more interested in small clips of wrestlers doing moves over watching a whole match.
Studies show that the attention span of Gen Z is around eight seconds, which can make it hard to hold their attention for extended periods of time, like a three-hour wrestling show.
Even Rowan students themself have their preferences on what they watch in terms of length.
“I’m more susceptible to short-form content than something that would be three hours like wrestling,” said Rowan University student Andrew Manganello, a sophomore marketing major.
But one thing that did enthrall the younger generation was the storytelling. During the Bloodline era of WWE (late 2020-present), the storytelling of the gimmick with Roman Reigns and his cousins of his actual family, or bloodline.
“I think I’m always going to be a sucker for the storytelling. The storylines are really what build it, because the fact that you can like a character from ten years ago is, you know, the biggest thing for me about anything,” said Ari Gilbertson, a freshman marketing major.
Ratings reports from the website “Wrestlenomics”, a website that logs the ratings of each major professional wrestling show, posted an article showing the ratings of each year from 1993 to 2024 as a percentage of people who have access to the network who watched live.
Along with the percentage is the age group split between P2+ (two years old and above) and P18-49 (between 18 and 49) in order to gauge the age group between kids and adults, or the older generation and newer generation in this case.
A drastic drop between 2019 and 2020 in the P2+ category begins dropping from 1.08 down to .88 before jumping back up to 1.03 by 2024. During this time, the aforementioned Bloodline era begins, leading to a multi-year storyline. This time sees multiple boosts in ratings as high as 52% from the 2022 and 2023 Royal Rumble. Royal Rumble Ratings boost
The years 2022 and 2023 are the time when the storylines with wrestlers Roman Reigns and Cody Rhodes were at an all-time high.
The past years have not been kind to the viewership of professional wrestling, being a quarter to a half of itself in viewers for the past two decades. However, WWE has begun to find its stride again in creating stories that draw the attention of the newer generations and hold them longer with the drama and story presented on screen.
While there is no guarantee that they will ever reach the ratings they used to, they have made a step in the right direction.
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