How could they have got Monday nights right? They ended on Monday's with a 0.8 rating. How is that in any way the right direction to take the company?

as i said tough it out and build the monday audience. raw being as it is will lead to fans who might check out the competition.

business isn't always about immediate numbers,sometimes you need to speculate to accumulate.

Toughing it out probably wasn't that easy for Spike however who I imagine made the call to move back to Thursday nights.

The Monday night strategy was entirely wrong. You do not build an audience by airing opposite your biggest/only market place competition. It was a poorly conceived attempt to try and recreate the Monday Night Wars (because why think of new ideas when you can just re-use all the old ones is the pro-wrestling motto) that ironically enough overlooked the rather key ingredient of WCW's success with Nitro – it already had an established and strong audience prior to launching a show opposite Raw.

yeah no doubt spike or tna panicked, maybe even both.

just a shame i felt. direct competition would have helped them both in long run.

fact is so many people dont even know tna is still going nowadays. if it was prime time monday live that would not be the case. maybe they would be dead lol but like i said it would require a will to see it through from the network and tna.

I don't think it would have. TNA weren't ready to compete head-to-head which left an unavoidable narrative of TNA failure and WWE dominance that wouldn't and didn't help their public perception. The situation would only have gotten worse for them had they stuck on Monday nights since they would have just become increasingly desperate to try and gain some kind of traction or attention opposite Raw and as we saw from WCW when it started losing the Monday Night Wars no good can come from that. In fact there's quite a few examples from the WWE's side of the fence on this score as well.

It can't have hurt them being owned by the owner of the network so Turner was more open to toughing it out than Spike was.

no doubt. turner had a will to compete and boy did he!

makes it worse he has no influence today

Okay, well we can clear this up right here: It wasn't.

I'm certainly not saying pointless negativity is TNA-exclusive! I'm saying you get a lot more of it on TNA threads, often posted by people who make no attempt to find anything to enjoy about TNA, and are often much more even-handed about WWE.

I'm a bit confused by the ratings example. To my mind all TNA's DA ratings have been surprisingly good. Anyway I love discussing ratings, good or bad. I don't think I've ever said let's stop discussing ratings.

Oh BTW, Glasgow Impact's ratings were slightly down from Lockdown in the US. But in the UK, there was a predictable, massive, increase. Challenge's top rated show for the week I believe.

WCW didn't need to tough it out though. Nitro and Raw were effectively dead even during the opening months of the Monday Night War because WCW already had an established audience and presence. Its Saturday night show in this period was rating phenomenally well at this point as in was capable of pulling in better numbers than Raw (something people tend to forget or not know).

you say you dont wanna copy history but then want every company to follow same formula to success.

i think you just want to be negative all the time! come on alexi, cheer up.

In what way are you coming to this conclusion?

Madonna has blocked grado from using like a prayer on the American broadcast of impact. #sayyesmadonna is the top trend in the uk

That's a shame. His entrance in Manchester was *amazing* - really one of the most fun few minutes I've ever had at wrestling. If they did the full Like A Prayer entrance in Glasgow I bet it was even better

On the other hand I'm really not sure TNA are in a position to be paying to use a Madonna track for entrance music. Like a Prayer won't come cheap. It feels like there's probably better uses for their resources at this point.

And we won't even get into asking why they filmed an entrance for television using music they clearly didn't have the rights to...

So, Madonna vs Dixie at the next TNA PPV?

I was OK with the return to the 4 sided ring but it looked so small compared to the WWE ring. Don't know if it was much smaller but it looked it visually. Either way, TNA was doing some really strange stuff back then such as:

- Booking Nasty Boys like it was 1991 again
- Debuting Jeff Hard during an X Division match in which a guy couldn't get out of a the dome thing
- Having Orlando Jordan beat Samoa Joe in a squash match
- Having Eric Young, who was on top form a year earlier, go babyface for no reason and get squashed by Kevin Nash

I wasn't keen on the booking but they couldn't get execution right either. I remember Sting having to beat RVD with a bat for what seemed like an eternity because Hogan was late getting to the ring.

TNA was great to me between 2004 and 2007, and I watched avidly until 2010. What put me off was that hokey stuff with Abyss and the spiked bat, especially when he had it stuck to his back. I gradually stopped watching but came back for Bound for Glory '10 and the aftermath. It felt like a dying brand to me by early 2011.

I believe at the tapings Grado actually used a very similar cover rather than the Madonna original. I've no idea about the legalities of it but I doubt they'd have used it if they had to pay much, given how tight the purse strings are since Bob stopped footing the bill. It's a bit like B&Q using those soundalike covers in their stores. Listen closely next time you're in there - every song is a virtually indistinguishable cover of the hit in question. It must reduce PRS bills or something.

And the point of using some version of Like A Prayer at the tapings is so you get the reaction (and it was *epic*). If you have to dub on a soundalike for broadcast, so be it. You still have the reaction. It would have been so lame if Grado had come out to a soundalike live, especially in Glasgow I'd imagine.

Grado uses a cover version by a band called mad house for his entrance. This may only effect the american broadcast

That was one of the most surreal things I saw at Wembley Arena. I was just sitting there in complete bemusement.

For those that were not there in person for the Manchester taping you check it out on (you guessed it) YouTube
http://youtu.be/YhrAflweAX8

Glasgow entrance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BvkHWZJZDE

I see Joes already appeared in the alumni, while Velvet still hasn't, and shes also stillup on the knockouts.

What's the story behind this Grado thing anyway? Why is he using a 25 year old Madonna hit as his entrance? She's not exactly the sort of singer I would imagine to be popular among wrestling fans.