A busy week: there’s a live stream of AAA or CMLL every day from tomorrow Friday to Wednesday. I don’t know how good any of it will be, but there sure is a lot of it.
AAA on Twitch streams on Saturday and Wednesday. Neither card looks all that exciting. The opener on Saturday does feature a bunch of people who haven’t been seen at all this year. The Lucha Underground crew is back full time starting with the Wednesday show. That Saturday show on Twitch is overlapping the AAA show on Space, which is the first time I can recall two AAA shows being on at the same time. It’s happened to CMLL in the past.
CMLL tomorrow is going to confuse people. It’s an iPPV for people who are used to getting it for free, and it’s a 9:30pm start for people who are used to it being 8:30pm. It’s also going to be an good show, though one where I can’t imagine anyone outside of dedicated CMLL fans paying for it or talking about the matches afterwards. On the other again, certain voting results suggest there’s more internet English speaking fans of CMLL than I would’ve figured.
In the midst of the other content, IWRG maybe has two tapings or maybe not, there’s never any telling if that Wednesday show will actually air. And maybe Kraneo actually turns tecnico this week in Puebla, but where will that leave Mije? They don’t have enough rudos in the micro division to survive him joining the tecnico side.
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I’m genuinely curious about this, and since info seems scarce online, I figured I’d ask here. How exactly does AAA make their money? Twitch streams can’t be bringing much in, PPV buys are not a viable revenue source for most companies anymore. LU, I’ve heard, is a money vacuum due to production and talent costs, and it seems like almost every show that pops up is for TV with almost no house shows. I’m genuinely perplexed as to where the money comes in because I don’t see a path to profitability anywhere.
AAA’s main revenue sources are
1) revenue from the big events each year (TripleMania, Rey de Reyes, etc – anything that has a name)
2) sponsorship (BOING, whatever’s on their referee shirts this week)
3) renting out their wrestlers
Any TV taping that’s not one of those big shows, any AAA ‘house show’ (there a few hundred of those a year, I don’t mention them in the new update unless they’re relevant and they’re never relevant) are being paid for by a local promoter. AAA will get a guaranteed amount, which varies depending on which wrestlers are on the show and how many and the relationship between the local promoter and AAA among other factors. AAA passes some of that money onto the wrestlers and keeps some of it themselves.
(Who gets what, and if AAA is still entitled to a share if the wrestler and the promoter are directly work together without them, can be a source of tension. It appeared to be a factor in why people have gone out on their own.)
People who know the situation better than me say that first source – the money they make from the major shows – is the biggest source of the income of the three. I think the booking out of wrestlers in the third source keeps them going well between those big shows.
I don’t have financial documents, so I have no idea for sure. I don’t have them for LU either, but my impression is AAA themselves has not been a major funder of the promotion since Season 1, and it doesn’t seem like anyone beyond El Rey is paying for much of it now.