AEW President and CEO Tony Khan discussed several topics with Jon Alba on The Takedown on SI, including the significance he places on fan feedback.
Khan said, “Yeah, a lot. I put a lot of merit into that feedback. I really like to hear what the fans think in the arenas and at home. And sometimes I’ll have people in wrestling if I mention these things, say, ‘Why do you care?’ Because it’s the fans, I do care. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people who work in pro wrestling tell me that I listen to the fans too much, or spend too much time thinking about what the fans think. Not the case. You always should be listening to the fans. And there’s always, always good insight from listening to the fans.”
On the value of different opinions:
“You could have many different opinions. If you asked, say, 100 wrestling fans to name their top 20 wrestlers, I’d bet you would get 99 or 100 different answers. And if you pulled 10,000 wrestling fans and ask them to name their top 25 wrestlers, I bet you would get maybe 9,998, 9,999; maybe even 10,000 different responses. Which is amazing. That’s how many great wrestlers there are. That’s how many different opinions there are.
On what he’s learned from wrestling fans:
“From current wrestling fans, I think I learned a lot of things. One thing is who they don’t want to see, and who they like. And ‘who they don’t want to see’ doesn’t necessarily mean who they boo. But I think I learned all different things from the fans. One of the most interesting things to do is to study TV ratings patterns. And that’s fans at home, and that’s different sometimes from the reactions of the fans in the arena. You might see somebody that gets a really good reaction in the arena that doesn’t always get ratings. That’s something that can be interesting to look at. And the flip side. You can get people that do really well in the ratings but don’t get the biggest reactions in terms of the volume hearing them in the arena. And that’s interesting too. So I think studying the fans, listening to the fans, it’s really important.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
