Maybe it’s because of the summer season coming up, but the idiocy of certain portions of TSM is really starting to shine through. The most recent example of this would be over the number of buys that One Night Stand got. The first estimates of the number of buys are out, and ONS is pegged at around 265,000 to 275,000 buys, and there are people who are proclaiming, almost gleefully, that this means it was a flop. I’m wondering if these people even have a clue what they are talking about, or if they’re so determined to see ONS as a flop, for whatever reason, that they fail to apply even simple logic to the evaluation that the buy rate was a flop.

The entire PPV was sold on WWE TV over WWE ‘crusaders’ invading a PPV that was being held under the banner of a promotion that not a lot of people at home knew anything about. Sure, WWE fans might have heard the ECW initials chanted from time to time on TV, and there might have been some holdover fans from ECW that have stuck around, but how many WWE fans today do you think have any real clue about who or what ECW was? And how many of them that are aware of it even have the emotional attachment to ECW to want to tune into a PPV to see them fight off the ‘crusaders’ from WWE?

RRR pointed out, and it was something that either went over the heads of the naysayers or something they desperately tried to play down to make their shaky point look good, not one match was announced or promoted on television. It was never pushed that you would see Lance Storm take on Chris Jericho, Rey Mysterio take on Psicosis, Chris Benoit take on Eddie Guerrero, and so on. Now, unless you’ve got a Wrestlemania or Royal Rumble PPV that has huge name value, what PPV is ever going to draw big numbers without one match announced?

As for promoting and pushing the ECW name and concept on television, WWE did a generally piss poor job. They didn’t show any interviews from people involved in ECW to talk about it. They didn’t show matches from ECW, either in full or in clip packages, to give people a true idea of what ECW about. They did nothing like that. All they did was promote a series of ‘ECW rules’ matches on Raw, which were really just glorified ‘Hardcore’ matches, that neither showcased the true spirit of ECW, nor featured ECW wrestlers. It was WWE wrestlers who either happened to be part of ECW or were going to be part of the ‘crusaders’ group that was going to invade ONS. Now, with angles that came across as WWE wrestlers attacking a single WWE wrestler, how does that make the PPV look any different, and more attractive, to any other standard WWE PPV? People are already picking and choosing what WWE PPV’s they want to buy, so why should they treat any differently a PPV that, on the surface, which is as far as most casual fans look, looks just like every other PPV WWE offers up?

Sure, the last Raw and Smackdown shows before ONS ended with a group of ECW guys fighting off the ‘crusaders’ that would be at the PPV, and as stand alone angles go they were enjoyable, but those two angle were not enough to counter what had been, up to that point in time, a terrible job of building a PPV that was depending on strong promotion to get the numbers of buys that it had the potential to achieve.

With the bulk of the promotion of ONS ignoring the fact that the majority of people at home didn’t have a real clue about who or what ECW was, something that really needed to be hammered into the brains of people in order to make them emotionally invested into wanting to see this PPV, is it any wonder that a PPV which, going into it, felt like every other WWE PPV got the same number of buys as every other WWE PPV?