AEW Double Or Nothing Lands Increased Buyrate Over Last Year

AEW Double or Nothing faced major competition from a game seven in the NBA Playoffs. Tony Khan had hoped to avoid such a situation, but the deciding Eastern Conference Finals game between the Boston Celtics and Miami Heat almost assuredly cut into the total buys for the pay-per-view. Despite that, it appears as though the show will wind up being AEW’s third most-watched PPV in company history.

The final numbers are not in yet. That said, Tony Khan did announce that this was the most watched of all previous Double or Nothing events. Last year’s version brought in around 140,000 buys.

Dave Meltzer broke down the preliminary tally in this week’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter. Based on streaming numbers, this year’s show was well ahead of last year’s. Traditional cable buys are only in for about half of the U.S., with an expected dip of 8.53%, largely owing to the pivotal NBA game.

“Business numbers are not complete at this point in time. Tony Khan announced and it was also announced on the air that it was the largest audience ever to watch a Double or Nothing show. Last year’s show did 134,000 to 140,000 PPV buys. Khan said that based on streaming numbers, which they would know immediately, it was well ahead. We do have television cable numbers for about half the U.S., which were down 8.53 percent from Revolution. If that holds up worldwide, that would be about 155,000 buys and be the third largest in history. But at this point we don’t have streaming PPV numbers, which are the bulk of orders. We do know, surprisingly, that the decline outside the U.S. was larger than the decline in the U.S., so perhaps it’s a little lower than that estimate and closer to the 150,000 projection days before.

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The only thing we were told is that U.S streaming numbers were very close to Revolution, so internally they considered it great given the NBA competition and it beat last year’s show “by far.” It won’t be top two, and late buys would be up because some who did watch the NBA game may have ordered the show later.

Of all the people who purchased either of the two nights of WrestleMania on PPV, 3.2 percent purchased Double or Nothing on television PPV, so of people who bought either night of WrestleMania as a PPV, 96.8 percent of those people did not purchase DON.”

We will have to see how the final numbers look once they become available. Given the competition from a major sporting event that drew 9.875 million viewers, it looks like AEW did pretty well. Time will tell if they can continue to grow each event year over year.

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