Thursday, June 8, 2017

Pro Wrestling: The next big thing in pro wrestling part 2

I'm going to take some of the blame for whats happened. I'm going to take some of the blame for YouTubes decision to basically ruin pro wrestling on YouTube. For those of you who don't know back in March YouTube decided create something called Restricted Mode. In order to protect their advertisers from programming that they deem not suitable for the advertiser they reclassified pro wrestling as unsuitable. Basically companies that were making money off ads can't do that anymore. If a company was making $5,000 a month off their YouTube channel that's $60,000 a year now gone from their books. That's not a problem to World Wrestling Entertainment but if your a tiny company like What Culture Pro Wrestling it's a big goddamn problem. I take some of the blame for this because back in April I wrote part of this post about how YouTube was helping pro wrestling grow. Now two months later it's trying to kill it. Well now I'm going to explain why this decision is actually going to hurt YouTube. The acronym "WTF!" will now appear often throughout this post.


First off have you ever heard of Twitch? What Twitch is basically YouTube but owned by Amazon. The major difference is in how content creators get money. See on Twitch you can still make money on advertising. But you can also make money on donations and subscriptions. Now think about if you offer your subscribers your regular content for free but premium content every week for the low price of $5 a month. If your What Culture you go on your social media channels and inform everyone about your new product. You don't leave YouTube but it doesn't become a main platform for you to grow your product. If 10% of your 1 million YouTube subscribers purchase your premium product on Twitch per month than "WTF!", why the fuck, do you worry about YouTube?



Take into consideration that on Twitch you can also accept donations from viewers. That means your viewers can donate money to you whenever they like. So you don't have to only live and die by advertisers or a subscription count. Even a few donations per month can go a long way for a channel. Twitch is used a lot by gamers for live streaming their gaming sessions. So live wrestling isn't a stretch if Twitch were to allow it. The different ways to make money on the platform is great for the companies. The best part is if your Twitch parent company Amazon you now have something that can pull viewers away from YouTube. It's like, "WTF!", who the fuck thought it was a good idea to give us all this new content?


Now "WTF!", when the fuck are all these companies going to find time to make content for YouTube and Twitch? You have to realize that any change will not be overnight. It would be a gradual thing. Any real change would only occur if someone really broke out with a lot of money from Twitch. I'm thinking Paul Heyman and his Heyman Hustle channel maybe the best candidate to test this theory. Paul gets the idea of original content and monetizing that on a small platform very well.


The question to ask is does Twitch allow pro wrestling to be on it's platform. If not than "WTF!", what the fuck are they doing in the stream video business if they don't? The only other options to stream wrestling content is Dailymotion. The problem is there's not money or potential for money on Dailymotion. If your Twitch you have something in pro wrestling that if it were to catch on could bring content makers of other varieties to your platform. Amazon is fighting Netflix, Hulu and YouTube in one space but if they could take away something from one of them that would help their cause greatly. You know that any money that Twitch makes Amazon will get a cut. So if your Amazon maybe it would be in your best interest to have Twitch allow pro wrestling on its platform. Most people don't even know that Amazon owns Twitch so if it backfires have them cut off pro wrestling and move on. If it works than Amazon gets to advertise Amazon and whatever else it wants to a growing audience. Keep in mind the pro wrestling business in on an independent wrestling boom right now, globally. Sounds like free money for me.


Which brings me back to YouTube. I don't get why you want to take money out of these companies pockets to appease advertisers that only care about channels that get lots of views. The channels that were growing in viewers and subscribers were opening themselves up to bigger audiences. Shouldn't that drive advertisers to give YouTube money to advertise on YouTubes growing channels? I'm guessing I missed something or this is a case of some old men screaming to get off their lawn. Anyway you look at it I think I've redeemed myself. Twitch should make itself more friendly to pro wrestling companies to steal original content creators from YouTube. Especially when those content creators make "Live" available on at least a quarterly basis. Amazon should view Twitch as a possible side arm to shoot it's competition with it's own bullets. The wrestling companies should realize that the possibilities for monetization of its original content could be great on Twitch since it would be multi-sourced. The larger companies like R.O.H., Impact, N.J.P.W. and even W.W.E. should consider the opportunity at reaching a younger audience and monetizing the viewing habits of that audience as a possible new path to growth. Twitch may need to review it's policies with content creators in order to be more friendly where YouTube is not. They may also want to give content creators a better deal on profits if the channel grows at a faster rate. Basically there's a lot to think and talk about.


If you think I'm full of crap than allow me to direct you to iTunes. Check out the number of pro wrestling podcasts not just on iTunes but all over the internet. From Colt Cabana starting a little show that got him advertisers and sponsorships we now have some of the biggest names in the history of the business having their own shows. From Colt Cabana mentioning One Hour Tees as the place where you can but his t-shirts and merchandise you now have Pro Wrestling Tees. And doesn't he have a YouTube channel? Yes, I believe he does. I'm guessing a Twitch channel is not a far out idea for him.


I don't know how many Young Bucks shirts there are but if you do some math you'll see they make a lot of money. I they have 20 different t-shirts on sale for $20 each that's potentially $400 in sales if they sell all of them. Now split half of that to Pro Wrestling tees and the other half to the Bucks. Now they split that between the both of them. That's only $100 each if your paying attention. But that's on sales for just one day. There are on average 30 days in a month. So if the Young Bucks sell 20 t-shirts in a day at $20 each over a website than in a month they should be making $3,000 each per month. That's a decent amount of money for just wrestling shirts.


Now I don't know if that's the kind of deal they have with One Hour Tees. But considering how many wrestlers and wrestling companies have t-shirts for sale I'm sure they got into that business with that company because it was making decent money. Apply that thinking to Twitch live streaming, paid subscriptions, advertising and donations to see that there's money on the table for everyone. By the way Twitch is already on gaming platforms PlayStation and Xbox so that helps. Everyone except YouTube and Google of course. What The Fuck were they even thinking?

+WWE
www.jimcornette.com
www.whatculture.com

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