Chris Jericho gets granular with viewership stats.
Chris Jericho appeared on Sports Media with Richard Deitsch and talked about how he’s always been a “numbers” guy and became the “Demo God” with All Elite Wrestling. Jericho explained how closely he follows statistics, noting that it’s the same whether he’s tracking ticket sales with Fozzy or viewership with AEW. When it comes to the latter, Jericho explained why the key demographic is more important and why AEW never worried about what NXT was doing while the two shows ran head to head on Wednesday nights.
“No. Not to be blasé about it, but I really don’t care [about NXT’s statistics]. It doesn’t matter to me. Even when we were in the wrestling war, quote unquote, on the Wednesday nights, we never followed what NXT did. Now when the demos came out — that’s why I started ‘Demo God’ because everyone was talking about NXT. Sometimes they’d be beating us in overall numbers, and I was like, ‘You guys don’t get it. The demo, we’re killing them.’ [They’d say] ‘Oh well it doesn’t matter, it’s all about [the viewership]’ And I realized very quickly, years ago, it’s not about [viewership] — OK, there’s a million people watching this show and 500,000 people watching this one. The demo of the million draws 200,000 [viewers] and the demo of the 500,000 show is 400,000. The 500,000 wins.
“And you’re like, ‘how does that make sense?’ Because the demo is what people base the advertising rates on. It’s just the way of the world, 18 to 49 [the key demo] is the ‘bread and butter.’ If you got a bunch of 12-year-olds watching, that’s good because they’ll grow into 18s. If you got a bunch of 60-year-olds watching — not to be classless — but nobody really cares, that’s not the demo they’re going for. So when you learn that information, that’s all that I cared about. It’s ‘What are we doing with AEW?’ We never went head to head with NXT and I know for a fact that they had AEW on their screens as they were running their show. ‘Oh, there’s Jericho right now. I’ll keep so-and-so in there a little bit longer.’ Whatever. We didn’t worry about that because all we can worry about is our own stuff.
“How can we tell better stories? How can we be a better show? How can we connect better with our audience? And obviously, we did that because NXT ran screaming away from us and completely restructured their whole show after they were basically embarrassed by AEW. And now AEW is getting to the point where we’re starting to get, sometimes beating WWE RAW in the demos, beating SmackDown in the demos. That should never be happening, but it is.
Jericho then used a Game Of Thrones reference to explain how AEW is proceeding with things, and why they aren’t concerned with what WWE is doing.
“OK, we are inside the castle. How can we make the castle stronger and get more people in the castle? The White Walkers are out there, but if we worry about what the White Walkers’ strategy is, we’ll be paying too much attention to their stuff instead of worrying about our stuff. Then someone’s going to bust down the castle wall and then we’re done. So, I think we’ve got to just worry about what we’re doing and stay more focused on that, and that’s what we do. At least that’s what I do.”
Chris Jericho previously used a GOT reference to explain why beating NXT was still a victory because they “won” the Wednesday night battle, but it was never anything they were obsessed with winning. Read his remarks about winning the battle and why fans are reacting to well-crafted stories on AEW TV at this link.
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