Nick Aldis talks turning down AEW, building the NWA brand, and more!

DDT: Do you feel the pros outweigh the cons of social media in wrestling nowadays?

Aldis: I think that’s all dependent on how you use it and how you utilize it and what you put stock in. Yes, the ability to reach your particular audience and monetize them is huge. It’s a great situation for a smaller startup company like ours because we can target and find the audience we resonate with. Where I think people get off on the wrong exit is it becomes a very inaccurate barometer of public opinion.

I can tell you for a fact that TNA and in particular Dixie [Carter] had a hugely disproportionate view of what the Twitter conversation represented in the wider audience because they represented at the time one-third of our overall audience.

About one of the other thirds of that audience is we had at our peak where we were doing two million viewers was kind of what I was talking about people were the fans that used to watch WCW who, for whatever reason, weren’t WWE fans and they didn’t like that product and they found something different and they liked it and we had them.

Around 2010-2011, the product told them “All that stuff you liked that made TNA unique? You don’t want that anymore.” And we lost them. We never got them back. Twitter is very easy to manipulate to make it look like you’re doing better than you really are. “Look, we’re trending!”

It’s really not that hard to be trending in any given moment if there’s really not much else going on. All you have to do is something stupid or say something controversial and chances are you’ll be trending, you know what I mean?

It’s not equally converted to Pay-Per-View buys and merchandise buys and things like that. What it can do is maintain loyalty with a portion of our audience is creates a false sense of security and a bit of a pathway to laziness and that’s certainly what happened with IMPACT.