Business of Wrestling: Why WWE Should Drop Its May PPV over the Limit

When discussing wrestling on Twitter the other day, a fellow B/R and pro-wrestling writer made an interesting comment to me. 

He said (and I’m paraphrasing here), “May is the WWE’s worst month of the year.” 

I thought about what he said and realized that he’s probably right. May usually does suck for the WWE and the only months that really even seem to come close lately are September and October. 

The May slump is a result of a number of different factors, such as the post-WrestleMania lull and a jam-packed pay-per-view schedule that leaves little room for the buildup of quality storylines. 

As a result, the WWE’s May PPVs have slowly but surely continued to tank in recent years. 

Judgment Day was the WWE’s May PPV from 2000 to 2009, and before it was retired, you could see that it was starting to lose steam, and more importantly, viewers. 

Check out Judgment Day’s recent buyrates, courtesy of PWTorch.com (via WrestlingInc.com): 

"

Judgment Day 2007: 242,000 buys

Judgment Day 2008: 252,000 buys

Judgment Day 2009: 228,000 buys 

"

Surely this wasn’t a dramatic decrease in the number of PPV buys for Judgment Day, but it was in fact a decrease, and one that was only made worse when the WWE rebranded Judgment Day as Over the Limit in 2010. 

According to WWE’s corporate website, the inaugural Over the Limit PPV saw a huge drop in buys, plummeting from 228,000 (Judgment Day 2009) to 197,000 (Over the Limit 2010). 

Things didn’t get much better for the WWE the second time around, as the 2011 Over the Limit  absolutely bombed in the buyrate department, generating just 140,000 buys. 

The only WWE PPV that generated fewer buys than Over the Limit in 2011 was Vengeance, which had just 130,000 buys, good enough to give it the second-lowest buyrate in WWE history according to Wrestling Newsletter Observer (via SEScoops.com).

Given that the 2011 Over the Limit PPV only drew 10,000 more buys than Vengeance, the logical assumption is that Over the Limit ranks up there as one of the top-five or so fewest PPV buys in WWE history as well. 

Although the WWE’s incredible drop in May PPV buys can be traced back to a number of factors (some outside of the WWE’s control and some not), the bottom line is that the trend is that there is a genuine lack of interest in May PPVs. 

Better yet, Over the Limit can only be deemed as a catastrophic failure given that it in 2011 it generated more than 100,000 fewer PPV buys than Judgment Day did just four years prior. 

So, what does this tell us? That the 2012 version of Over the Limit should be the last OTL PPV ever and that the WWE should seriously consider reshuffling the PPV schedule to make it work. 

Here’s what I’d do: Move Extreme Rules two weeks back from the end of April to mid-May (giving it six weeks of build after WrestleMania), completely drop Over the Limit from the PPV schedule and then give the WWE more time (it would be an extra week) to build toward No Way Out in June. 

I realize that the WWE likely won’t go for this because Vince McMahon is not going to want to get rid of a PPV, but Over the Limit just isn’t working and having three PPVs in a seven-week span isn’t working either. 

It’s completely unnecessary for the WWE to have so many PPVs in such a short span immediately after WrestleMania, which is traditionally a down time in terms of TV viewership and overall interest in the WWE. 

I don’t think anyone can argue that the programs and angles we’re currently seeing on WWE TV aren't exactly riveting, and this stems from the WWE being rushed to put on Over the Limit. 

Wanna change that, WWE? Drop Over the Limit, because it’s not doing much for you anyway.

Drake Oz is the WWE Lead Writer for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter and ask him any wrestling-related questions (to be answered in the B/R Mailbag) on Formspring.