By Rick Gardner, PWTorch specialist

KEY MOMENT OF THE WEEK: Examining the WWE Cyber Sunday PPV Concept

At the height of WWF's popularity in the late 1980s, the company ran four pay-per-views per year: Royal Rumble, Summer Slam, Survivor Series, and WrestleMania. The matches on these cards were the culmination of months of careful booking, a prime example of which being Hulk Hogan's WWF title win over the Macho Man Randy Savage at WrestleMania 5, which had been planned a year in advance.

During the mid-90s when WCW increased the frequency of their pay-per-views to once a month, the WWF had no choice but to follow suit. This proved hugely profitable during the last wrestling boom, when fans were clamoring for as much as the WWF product as possible, but since the "Attitude Era" the twelve PPV model has meant that the WWE has little time between its pay shows to provide an adequate build up.

To make this work, the WWE has to work hard to differentiate one card from another, thus the Cyber Sunday concept was born. Allowing fans to vote on match stipulations makes Cyber Sunday stand out from the other shows on the pay-per-view calendar. Interestingly, it also provides a measure of how well the WWE booking is catering to its fan base. However, none of these factors have historically resulted in a successful buy rate for the show.

Cyber Sunday 2008 hardly vindicated the work of the WWE creative team. As was the case in previous years, the booking leading into Cyber Sunday encouraged fans to vote a certain way, which was subsequently ignored by voters. In promos leading up to the show Matt Hardy and Triple H encouraged fans to vote for Mark Henry and Vladimir Koslov, respectively, but both ended up receiving a meager amount of text votes. Instead, the more athletically gifted Evan Bourne and Jeff Hardy were voted in, flying in the face of WWE sentiment that small wrestlers cannot headline pay-per-views.

Another factor going against the Cyber Sunday concept is that the move to text message voting put the WWE in direct competition with a plethora of shows that ask for viewers to vote. The fact that Hardy and Bourne beat Koslov and Henry so comprehensively reveals an inherent flaw with the way that the WWE books its Cyber Sunday matches: the reliance upon fans voting for heels.

Smackdown viewers have endured weeks of Vladimir Koslov destroying Triple H and Jeff Hardy, two of the WWE's most popular wrestlers, so it's hardly surprising that fans are unwilling to spend 99 cents on voting for him. Usually TV shows encourage viewers to vote for their favorite or vote to remove their least favorite, but the booking for the Smackdown and ECW title matches bizarrely encouraged viewers to vote for the most-hated wrestler to receive a title match.

Despite this major flaw in the booking leading up to the pay-per-view, the main problem with Cyber Sunday is the interactive element on which it is based. Historically, low buy rates suggest that fans are unwilling to spend money on a card where they do not know the matches beforehand. When you consider that Cyber Sunday is so close to both No Mercy and the Survivor Series, it is easy to see why it has traditionally been a show that many WWE fans have skipped.

Cyber Sunday may have been revolutionary if it had been introduced ten years ago, but in an age where every other television show is vying for your text message vote, the concept is hardly ground-breaking. It is also difficult to successfully promote a pay-per-view where the fans do not know the line-up, particularly in the current economic climate.

Instead of using the confusing strategy of encouraging fans to vote for heels, the WWE should seek to maximize profitability by booking the shows leading up to the next Cyber Sunday around babyfaces that viewers will actually want to vote for.

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