TNA Wrestling: What They Need to Do in 2016
TNA Wrestling aka Impact Wrestling is moving to yet another new but little known network in 2016 in Pop TV. However, changing broadcast partners is not a cure-all for a product that is seemingly on its last leg. Here’s some suggestions on how they could try to improve things.
With TNA’s move to Pop TV in 2016 it would be a perfect time for the promotion to change their obvious downward spiral and hopefully turn it around to give fans an alternate to the currently stale WWE weekly programming. However, there are a lot of things TNA Wrestling needs to fix from both content and business perspectives to truly regain their position as a viable alternative to WWE.
The move to Pop TV with their 64.7% household reach (as of February 2015 according to TV By The Numbers) gives TNA Wrestling the opportunity to reach more people but they must give them a reason to. To do so they need to reach new viewers who have never watched their product before and regain former fans like myself who stopped watching a long time ago. In order to reach these two groups of viewers TNA needs to make some drastic changes.
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First and foremost they need to update their website. Simply going to the TNA roster page shows at least 2 stars listed that are now part of WWE and/or NXT. Bully Ray of course is back in the WWE as Bubba Ray of the Dudley Boyz and has been back in the WWE since August. James Storm is also listed as a current TNA talent yet has been in NXT since the end of October. This is completely inexcusable on TNA’s part. Move them to an alumni section or delete them, just don’t leave on the site that could cause confusion on the casual fan they should be trying to reach.
Find one location to do TV takings and keep them there on a regular basis. I would suggest either returning to the Nashville area and either return to the Asylum or find small towns where TNA Wrestling TV Tapings would be the go to event where they could fill the stands, even if it was just 1-2000 it would look much better than the current dark arenas they are taping in today. Doing TV tapings like this you either need to give free tickets or make them extremely affordable so you always have a full house. This will give the appearance of a must-see event to where over time you could return to running house shows and PPV events that actually sell tickets.
Reduce ticket prices. TNA Wrestling needs to realize they are not currently a major wrestling promotion and should not be pricing their tickets as such. Looking at their current ticket prices for the next TV tapings they are more reasonable at $10-25 but that may still be too high for the current product. A few years ago I remember they were selling tickets above WWE prices for house shows and not surprisingly attendance was very low. Higher attendance at lower prices will be good for everyone in the company from Dixie to the talent.
Re-brand the product away from “Impact Wrestling”. One of the most confusing things that TNA Wrestling has done in their history was when they re-branded themselves from TNA Wrestling to the name of their primary show “Impact Wrestling” (source Ad Week). Fans were chanting TNA, referred to the product as TNA so it made absolutely no sense on any level to re-brand the promotion as Impact Wrestling. Going back to TNA Wrestling as the featured brand with Imapct as their featured show. It may seem minor but everything should be built around the promotion vs the promotion being built around their weekly TV show.
Finally, do what WWE isn’t doing right now and listen to their fans to promote new talent. Push new talent and let them develop characters both in ring and with their promos. Be creative in matches and storylines. Come up with something new that could get people talking about your promotion in a positive way that would become must see TV. If they can do that they can once again look at doing house shows, pay per views, and attract more top talent. For the sake of professional wrestling let’s hope they are able to do so.