Thread:Thunder the Coyote/@comment-5688420-20200520094923/@comment-5688420-20200520103823

It's... much more complicated than that.

From 1995 to 1997, WCW Nitro actually beat the WWF Raw in the ratings. By 1998, WWF was picking up the pace with the Attitude Era, the brainchild of Vinnie Mac himself, as well as one "Vince Russo".

That same year, late 1998 saw WCW going down into a slump. First with ending Goldberg's winning streak, one of WCW's buggest draws at the time, then in 1999, they did the whole Fingerpoke of Doom thing which was intended as a take that to the WWF, but saw millions of fans switching channels. Didn't help that what followed in Nitro was... underwhelming. And that's an understatement.

Finally, when WWF got rid of Vince Russo in 1999, WCW picked him up in hopes to achieve the Attitude Era's success. What actually happened was a whole fuckload of bad booking decisions, including making a Z-lister celebrity into the promotion's World Champ (against his wishes), making himself the World Champ shortly after, loads and loads of swerves and pole matches, and for the final nail in the coffin, an unplanned shoot from Russo himself that drove Hulk Hogan away from WCW. Hogan, BTW, was their biggest draw, only behind Sting and Goldberg.

And that's not even getting into the fuckery that's going on backstage. Some of the big wrestlers are allowed to book their own matches. A power those wrestlers abused to all hell in order to make themselves look strong, and bury the rest of the roster. This led to a slew of boring, uninteresting angles.

And then... there was the AOL Time Warner merger. The new CEO made it perfectly clear that he hated wrestling, and so pulled the plug on WCW in March of 2001, further driving them into bankruptcy.

In the end, this slew of bad business decisions is what ultimately caused WCW to go down like a house of cards. By 2001, the once multi-million company was bought by the WWF for approx $2,500,000.