Was moving NXT to USA a mistake?
By Scott Keith on 31 July 2020
This week, more people watched wrestling on Wednesday night than the 3rd hour of Raw. And the combined demo beat Raw head to head.
Do you think Vince regrets moving NXT to cable? The goal was to prevent AEW from succeeding, yet theyre not only still around but TNT signed them for 3 more years for way more money. And NXT was for many people the reason to keep the Network, and those numbers keep going down.
And on top of that, theyve given AEW way too much free good publicity because every Thursday is a story about AEW beating NXT. Where it would have been about AEW's ratings looking minor league vs Raw or SD instead.
The Network numbers actually haven't gone down at all recently. NXT was a very small part of that, as the Network's subs depend almost entirely on the PPVs and live and die by those numbers.
And USA is paying them a ton of money for NXT in exchange for very low production costs, which trumps any other negative you can throw at it. So no, not a mistake at all. Could they be doing better? Yes. Was the show way better at one hour? Absolutely. But money is money.