Triple H appeared on the Bill Simmons podcast recently. He spoke about WWE’s handling of the global pandemic, the Thunderdome viewing experience, and SummerSlam. During the show, Simmons mentioned it has been hard for him to get into empty-arena wrestling and Triple H responded.
“The stand-up comic with no one in the building, right? He’s hitting his jokes and making himself pop,” Triple H compared empty-arena wrestling with. “It was surreal and for me, my hats off to our performers, anybody doing this.”
“The physicality hurts a lot more when there is nobody there making noice and you don’t have that adrenaline,” he continued.
Triple H also spoke about how having no crowd reactions hurts their ability to determine what is working and what isn’t.
“100%, you base almost all the reactions that we have as a company are based on how crowds are reacting,” he said.
“Crowd reaction, ticket sales, merchandise all those things factor into how you are utilizing talent and the direction you are headed with them, short term and long term, and now all that all of a sudden goes away. Because now you have merch sales but it’s different, it’s based on online sales, not in arena or whatever. You don’t have ticket sales anymore, you don’t have crowd reaction or noise.”
Triple H also continued to say using social media to judge a wrestlers popularity is tricky.
“Social media is very tricky because it can skew heavily depending on the platform, negative algorithms on some platforms are much stronger than others. So something bad happens, it trends immediately. Something good happens, it doesn’t even get out there because of how the algorithms works.”
Triple H also talked about how D-X would have done in the no-fans era, how Bray Wyatt is thriving in it, and more.