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Japan, America, Pro-Wrestling & Mass Media
By Zach Arnold | February 14, 2006
Why Japanese wrestling promotions have it easy compared to the US, and how promotions can grow with technology
By David Ditch
There’s no business quite like the professional wrestling business. Beyond aspects like the content of shows, kayfabe, a thorough lack of established practices and an inability to unionize, wrestling also has a unique situation in regards to delivering its product to the people.
By the time wrestling really caught on in Japan, it was the TV era. The business in both the US and Japan at the time was driven by ticket sales and revenues from highly-rated (especially by modern standards) broadcasts. This model still holds for the most part when it comes to major promotions if you add in pay-per-views, but a ragged second tier has emerged which didn’t used to exist.
In the US, local promotions have had to deal with the collapse of wrestling as a powerful TV ratings draw and Vince McMahon Jr’s creation of the nationwide wrestling promotion. This has the effect of making independents seem unimportant by default as well as eliminating what used to be the most effective tool for selling tickets. What few indie feds have a TV show are left to settle for horrible time slots, and even then on stations like UPN or WB. What’s worse, those networks are likely to treat indies like infomercials, demanding payment for the timeslot without any promotion of the show by the station. Those without TV must scratch for a living.
In Japan, where regional promoting isn’t as necessary due to the nation’s small size, second-tier promotions emerged to fill niches such as hardcore (FMW) and junior-heavyweight (Michinoku Pro et al) styles in fulfillment of basic economic theory. Since there was a profit to be had, firms entered to capture said profit and kept entering in order to vie for a share of it. Even with the industry-wide slump Japanese indies still have a number of things going for them:
-Coverage on nationwide cable TV shows (albeit after midnight)
-Japan’s dense population (especially in Tokyo), which makes it easy to draw 1000 people and exponentially cheaper to tour
-Pro wrestling’s coverage alongside major sports and the presence of respected wrestling magazines
-Korakuen Hall, a building mostly devoted to pro wrestling in a prime Tokyo location which can be used affordably and which can seat over 2000; there is no equivalent anywhere else in the world
-Availability of ‘under the table’ financing in case things are running in the red
Due to the inexorable post-kayfabe decline in pro wrestling’s acceptability in polite culture, the chances of US indies getting good TV time or anything resembling mainstream media coverage hovers around zero. America isn’t ever going to have a huge national hub city like Tokyo. So what can US indies do to grow and become profitable, or at least stable? The answer lies in efficiently tapping the wrestling market, and that can only be done through emerging media trends. And keep in mind that whatever US indies can do, Japanese indies can do better thanks to their inherent advantages.
One trend is the growth of broadband internet service. Although US broadband tends to pale in comparison to what is available elsewhere, it’s still leaps and bounds ahead of the modem era. Watchable-quality video can now be viewed via. stream or download by most serious internet denizens. On the hosting end things are better as well. Web servers can handle bigger loads more reliably than ever, and bandwidth costs are falling at an astronomical rate. Programs like BitTorrent offer another option to those wishing to spread large files. That doesn’t even take into account advances in computer video codecs, graphics cards, CPUs and LCD monitors. All told webcasting is more viable with each passing year, no matter what form it takes. This can be seen as more and more promotions offer online media.
Webcasting can have two different aims. First and foremost is using the internet to reach as large an audience as possible, since local and national TV is out of the picture. Second and less-explored is the use of webcasting for revenue. WWE webcasts have had a touch-and-go record for quality and profit, and file-sharing makes it exceedingly difficult to prevent mass piracy, so this is still a work in progress. However I’m confident that with decent password protection webcasting can be a high-profit source of revenue, especially if promotions can find ways of getting enough web traffic going in the right direction. Perhaps that isn’t even worth worrying about, since traffic itself can generate regular income thanks to the maturation of online advertising. Even at pennies per click and only a few clicks per thousand visitors it’s possible to stream gigabytes of video each day.
Yet another aspect of using online video content is the development of affordable video editing software and higher-quality camcorders. Because indie feds have such a small budget to work with things like good production values used to be out of the question (just watch an early ROH show for an example). It’s easier to produce a web-ready program that properly captures a wrestling show rather than capturing a wrestling show as if in a drunken stupor, and with lower costs added in on both the front and back ends having online content won’t be a significant cost for much longer.
Perhaps the least-discussed area touched by the internet is Europe. As a continent it has the fewest major wrestling shows per wrestling fan by quite a lot. Though the overall number of fans at any given moment can be hard to judge, it’s well into the millions. WWE tours in Europe are exponentially more profitable than in Japan, but there is currently no major promotion in sight to try and fully capture the market. Tens of thousands of Europeans download whole WWE shows every week from places which never advertise, and considering how Ameri-centric the WWE product is one can only imagine the potential for non-WWE wrestling there.
Of course for all my touting of webcasts I have no illusions about the internet’s limitations. The combined web traffic for all non-WWE wrestling websites (like here, here, and here) is rather small, and best-case scenarios for webcasting only make indie promotions slightly more viable. Things like the lower production cost of DVDs compared to VHS tapes won’t make much difference either, nor will the steady growth in the number of people online. You see, even though the computer can handle better-than-ever video quality it still pales in comparison to bigger, sharper televisions. Within the next generation 30+ inch digital screens will become the norm, and 50+ inchers will be middle-class items. TV rooms are vastly more conductive to watching extended amounts of video than are desk chairs. Ah, but with digital television comes digital cable, and with digital cable comes an opportunity for ever-cheaper high-definition video content.
It seems to me that the existence of a ‘wrestling channel’, or at the very least a ‘combat sports channel’ is inevitable in the world’s largest wrestling market. Heck, the US is one of the few western nations not to have one. Where in the past you needed a couple hundred thousand regular viewers to make a cable channel viable, now that number is probably closer to fifty thousand or less. I can practically guarantee 50,000 steady viewers for a pro wrestling network. And for the sake of pro wrestling one of the other possibilties on the horizon is even more mouth-watering: a la carte programming.
Congress is now considering legislation to mandate that cable services allow customers to buy their television channel-by-channel. One aspect of this is the ever-higher price charged by cable companies, which in turn is influenced by the price of carrying ever-higher numbers of channels. Most Americans are cable customers and if congress lowers their bill then political goodwill is bound to follow. The other aspect is a desire by lazy parents not to have to actively monitor what their kids are watching. Whether the law ever passes or would actually lower bills is another matter entirely, but at the very least it’s within the realm of possibility
So why is the potential of ‘a la carte’ so important for pro wrestling? For one thing, it means an end to the current system where it takes two wrestling viewers to equal one of any other program from an ad revenue standpoint due to stereotypes about wrestling fans and McMahon-pushed controversies. This is why UPN has been so willing to mess with its highest-rated show in Smackdown. Another thing is that it means efficient, direct measurement of generated revenue. If one million people are willing to pay thirty cents a month for 24 x 7 x 365 pro wrestling, that’s much more quantifiable than a vague sense of the value of advertising to a potential audience of one million wrestling viewers. To say nothing of the ‘true’ fan base of pro wrestling, which is much larger than a million, and which might pay more than thirty cents a month for non-WWE programming.
One final thing to consider is the synergizing of each kind of media. Webcasts can generate product and an audience for use in getting TV time. TV can be used to push PPV webcasts and DVDs. With a variety of potential streams of revenue, most of which are diminishing in costs, indies no longer have to live and die by the wild fluctuations of live show attendance.
Maximizing the revenue in any given industry can be tricky. Serving the ‘long tail’ has worked wonders for places like Amazon and Ebay where larger selections are available than can be found on any store. And while nothing can replace the feel of being there live, home entertainment offers pro wrestling a chance to cash in on the monies currently being lost to other forms of entertainment. Webcasts, DVDs and a la carte cable provide the opportunity to give every wrestling fan the most bang for his or her buck and just might be able to reclaim the souls who feel left out by Vince McMahon’s vision of ‘sports entertainment’.
Topics: All Topics, Dave Ditch, Pro-Wrestling | 3 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Excellent article.
Super article. Furthermore, a 24/7 wrestling channel would be outstanding.
What innovative concepts…….hummm……a few thousand bucks and-BAM!!
24/7 wrestling!!!………and while i LOVE the wwe product, ANYTHING else is a treat……….ROCK ON TNA!!