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comment_5896615

*bump*

I found a Kagan-sourced chart of the top 20 PPVs of the '80s in the November 1989 issue of Channels, which includes the PPV universe, buy rate, and gross for each show. I proceeded to write way too much about it: https://babyfacevheel.substack.com/p/i-fell-down-a-historical-ppv-buy

(If you want to skip to the key data for now, that's all in bold text, so you can skim before you read.)

Only one of the numbers, Survivor Series '87, is the same as what we've always used. The rest fluctuate greatly, usually upwards. Maybe because the newsletters generally reported on buy rates just a few weeks out when accurate PPV data always took famously long amounts of time to come in?

(Also, not in the chart, but something I included citing a different Channels article: The first WrestleMania apparently did over 100,000 buys on PPV, which is pretty incredible given the limited clearances and the national publicity explicitly advertising the arena experience.)

I'm VERY curious what everyone else thinks.

comment_5896640

"Ten million people went to wrestling matches during the past year [1988], and 30 million watch them on TV each week. The audience is not only in trailer parks and six -flats but in the Princeton Club of New York, where the downstairs TV set is often tuned to wrestling on Saturday. Although yuppies and their journalistic camp followers discovered wrestling a couple of years ago and gave it a tussle, its life in the mainstream has endured..." https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Channels-of-Communication/Channels-1989-01.pdf

How do these Hulkamania numbers compare to previous eras (1940s-1950s Gorgeous George/DuMont Network, 1970s territories, early 1980s TBS)?

 

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