Classic Wrestlenomics: Was WrestleMania III even more successful than we believed?
This isn't more Silverdome attendance drama, but it's still pretty interesting...
As longtime readers of this here blogletter may recall, I’ve fallen into rabbit holes in the past regarding the pay-per-view buy rate figures reported in wrestling and entertainment industry trade publications in the 1980s and the debate around the actual live attendance for WrestleMania III. Well, it’s time for those two topics to converge, albeit as an extension of something that came up in the first of the two pay-per-view articles. Specifically: Why did there appear to be a discrepancy as to how many homes the show was available in on pay-per-view?
For other PPV shows where we had a “universe” of homes that the event was available in, the data that Paul Kagan Associates had didn’t seem out of whack with what was always reported in wrestling circles. (Though Kagan generally reported inflated buy rate percentages that they were given by the PPV producer, Titan Sports/the World Wrestling Federation included, the universe figures generally seemed on point and there’s no real reason to inflate them.) For WrestleMania III, however, that figure was given as 6.5 million homes. With the historically accepted number being an 8.0% buy rate for about 400,000 homes, the math didn’t fit, as that would require a universe of about 5 million homes. Something was up, but I couldn’t figure out why. All I knew was that there was now reason to believe that WrestleMania III actually did about 520,000 buys.
Well, I was digging around in the ProQuest database (available for free with many local library cards) and found the coverage of WrestleMania III that made the front page of the April 1, 1987 issue of Variety. Not only Lawrence Cohn’s report corroborate the 6.5 million home universe claimed in the Kagan data, but it also breaks down that figure a bit. (The 6.5 million home universe was further corroborated by stories in Cable Television Business and Electronic Media, though both also include Titan’s 10.2% buy rate claim.) “The national p-p-network Viewer’s Choice distributed the event to its affiliate base, achieving 100% participation from its affiliates, covering approximately 1,600,000 homes,” wrote Variety’s Lawrence Cohn. “VC provided marketing support, while cable systems not affiliated with Viewer’s Choice also participated by receiving the ‘WrestleMania III’ cablecast directly from the WWF.”
If we only count homes in cable systems that dealt directly with the WWF, that would be a 4.9 million home universe. You can probably see where this is going: At an 8.0% buy rate, that would come out to 392,000 homes purchasing WrestleMania III on pay-per-view. If anyone was roundup up to get a more neat and clean sounding figure, which was far from uncommon, then that gets you 400,000 buys in a universe of 5 million homes.
(I’ve emailed Wrestling Observer Newsletter impresario Dave Meltzer to see what he thinks about this, but since it’s always hard to pin down if/when he will reply to emails, nobody should read anything into a lack of response. If he gets back to me, I’ll update this post.)
Regardless, if we look at this new information as further confirmation that WrestleMania III did about 520,000 buys, then even before we try to do any deeper estimates, it helps put into perspective just how successful the show did. With 520,000 PPV buys, 450,000 closed-circuit television tickets sold, and a hotly disputed live attendance figure that we can at least agree was ≥78,000, the show was viewed live by at least 1,048,000 people, the vast majority of whom paid for the privilege. That’s already incredibly impressive. But while each ticket inherently represent one person, PPV buys are different. Without access to any research that Titan might have done to determine the number of viewers per home for pay-per-view events, we need to take a guess.
On one hand, 2.4 viewers per home (officially “viewers per viewing household,” or VPVH for short) was the television industry standard for many years, including in 1987. However, that might not be the best figure to use. In the eras where we’ve have consistent VPVH figures for wrestling—roughly 1998-2005—they hover around 1.4 to 1.7. For pay-per-view, one would think it’s likely higher for a number of reasons, and it was provably even higher in 1987, when a lot less people had pay-per-view and were thus more likely to gather to watch major events.
If we split the difference to get 1.55 as the normal number of viewers per home for a televised wrestling show, then that would come out to 806,000 viewers for the PPV. Averaging that with the TV industry standard 2.4 VPVH gets you 1.975 VPVH would get you 1,027,000 PPV viewers, while going all the way to 2.4 VPVH gets you 1,248,000 viewers. But since it’s a pay-per-view event, the number being even higher than that is far from out of the question.
Either way? We can pretty comfortably say that WrestleMania III was seen live by 1 million to 1.5 million people, the vast majority of whom were either paying for the show or at least part of party paying for the PPV broadcast. In 1987. That’s impressive.