It is thought that WWE brought in the PG era a few years ago because it was made aware to the company that they were becoming more and more popular with the younger generation.
It seems that whilst there are a lot of younger fans attending WWE Live events currently, a new study has revealed that the average WWE fan is actually much older.
Magna Global conducted a new study for Sports Business Daily Global where they revealed that back in 2000 the median age for professional wrestling fans was 28-years-old, this then increased to 33-years-old in 2006 and more than a decade later it seems that the median age of fans right now is 54.
This is an increase of 26 years since 2000, which means that many fans of The Attitude Era have actually remained fans and grown older.
It’s a shock that WWE’s average age isn’t a lot younger since the company has worked hard over the past few years to make their programming more child-friendly, toned down a lot of their famous match types and even banned blood being shown on live TV.
The numbers obviously don’t lie, but looking at the study as a whole, it seems that the older generation is the one watching sports at this current moment, with all sports listed with a median age of around 40, which means WWE needs to do something to bring in their younger demographic again.
It’s not hard to figure out why… They try to make it kid friendly, and in doing so took out all the things that kids love. Kids are tiny sociopaths. They wanna see edgy stuff that seems ‘adult’. They don’t wanna see technical wrestling, they wanna see violence. I clearly remember when I was a kid being bored by longer segments and not watching entire matches because I was a kid and kids have zero attention span. I wasn’t allowed to watch WWF, I was allowed to watch WCW because it was more kid friendly (I watched circa 97-99 before being ‘too cool’ for wrestling and missed out on like 15 years of it). That didn’t stop me from wanting to watch RAW more than Nitro, especially after DX and Stone Cold really got big. I wanted to watch the more violent, more edgy, and more rough product. And most parents are way more lenient these days with that sort of stuff when I grew up. And on top of that, most parents who wouldn’t let their kids watch a TV-14 RAW wouldn’t let their kids watch a TV-G RAW.
Couple that with the fact that RAW is 3 hours now and if you lose interest and don’t watch the whole thing you wont know what’s going on next week… it really makes it hard to get kids to care about wrestling.
Also Cena is old and not on much and kids love Cena.