Reddit sentiment for WWE and AEW and how it correlates with attendance trends

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This analysis of comments from Reddit’s most active wrestling community, r/SquaredCircle, provides two key insights.

• WWE was the dominant topic on the subreddit in recent years, but AEW—despite WWE’s lead in television viewership and other more broad metrics—approached WWE in comment volume with this fan community in some months.
• AEW-related comments were more positive than WWE’s for several years, but that sentiment advantage began declining in mid-2022 and disappeared by mid-2023.

We shouldn’t mistake r/SquaredCircle users for an ideal cross-section population that proportionately reflects the consumer wrestling market, but the user base is large and meaningful insights can be gathered from a study like this while bearing in mind that the community is evidently skewed toward highly-engaged fans.

The first chart below shows the monthly count of comments containing selected keywords assigned to either WWE or AEW. While WWE consistently generated more comments, AEW’s presence in the subreddit was substantial, with notable increases that coincided with major events or news stories.

Open the interactive chart in a new tab

It’s unsurprising that we find the highest monthly volume for comments related to WWE was in April 2019, the month of that year’s Wrestlemania. And the highest single month for AEW’s comment volume was August 2021, the month that CM Punk debuted in the company.

The second chart measures the compound sentiment of those comments, scored using VADER Sentiment Analysis (no relation to Leon White).

Between late 2019 and mid-2022, AEW-related comments were substantially more positive than WWE-related comments. But that gap began narrowing steadily in mid-2022, and disappeared entirely by mid-2023, based on a twelve-month moving average. The sentiment for both WWE and AEW on the subreddit remained remarkably close thereafter and AEW was closing the gap as 2024 ended.

Open the interactive chart in a new tab

While r/SquaredCircle users are probably disproportionately engaged wrestling fans, the trajectory of sentiment over time—rather than any individual score on its own—is where the more meaningful insights of this study are found.

WWE’s lowest month for sentiment was October 2019, possibly related to the poorly-received Hell in a Cell pay-per-view. Notably, none of the key months in which Vince McMahon-related news emerged were in the running for lowest monthly sentiment for WWE: months like June 2022 (when news first broke), July 2022 (when he first resigned), January 2023 (when he returned), and January 2024 (when he resigned again). However, February 2024 is noticeably down, which makes sense as his resignation and news of the Janel Grant lawsuit broke in late January. Still, there were a number of other months in WWE’s recent past that measured lower.

The low point for AEW is in April 2024, the month the company decided to air security footage from months prior of CM Punk scuffling backstage with Jack Perry, the moment that led to Punk’s firing. The highs for either are less predictable, at least to me. For WWE, it’s June 2023, a month that contained the well-received Money in the Bank in London. The high month for AEW is June 2022, which contained the well-received first Forbidden Door pay-per-view.

Since I haven’t personally pored over the multitude of comments involved, the events I point to above are simply my intuitive suggestions, and it’s possible that entirely other events played heavily into these monthly results.

Beyond those outliers, probably more insightfully, this analysis also highlights change in sentiment over the course of months and years.

The results of this analysis support a general conclusion that may already be plain to those closely following the industry: optimism around AEW was strong through mid-2022, at which point sentiment reversed course. Meanwhile, sentiment around WWE improved steadily, however, not strictly inversely to the direction of AEW sentiment; WWE sentiment began trending upward beginning in late 2020.

Perhaps contrary to a reputation for negativity among wrestling fans who frequently engage in discussion online, there was never a month in this study’s 75-month timeline when average sentiment for either company was negative.

Why r/SquaredCircle?

r/SquaredCircle has over 1 million users subscribed. Multiple thousands of accounts are often simultaneously active, according to Reddit’s interface. While it’s important to acknowledge that an individual person may operate multiple accounts, the dataset used here was large, measuring about 5 million comments over a period of just over six years.

How did you get this data?

The data for ostensibly every comment in r/SquaredCircle’s archive through the end of December 2024 is available through Academic Torrents, which was relied on for this study. Academic Torrents is a non-profit data-sharing platform that hosts large public datasets, not limited to Reddit data, for academic and research use. The website is supported by university researchers and is used in many academic studies.

I started this study by downloading a 72.1 gigabyte JSON file that contained comments posted to the subreddit from 2012 through 2024.

For this project, in favor of focusing on recent wrestling history since the introduction of All Elite Wrestling, October 1, 2018, was selected as the starting point, so that we may account for any early discussions related to what would become All Elite Wrestling, even though AEW wasn’t formally introduced to the public until a few months later.

What the data looks like

More than 40 million comments on the subreddit from October 1, 2018, to December 31, 2024, were narrowed down to a total of 4,992,343 comments which could be clearly assigned to WWE or AEW based on selected keywords (which are listed in the next section). 3,611,620 comments were mutually exclusively assigned to WWE and 1,380,723 to AEW.

Of those comments, the WWE comments were written by at least 145,752 unique accounts and the AEW comments were written by at least 84,543 unique accounts. That doesn’t include an unknown number of accounts that were marked “[deleted]” (presumably because the account was deleted sometime later) by the time the data was collected by Academic Torrents. Among comments assigned to WWE, the median number of comments per account was 3; the average was 24.2. Among comments assigned to AEW, the median number of comments per account was 2; the average was 16.0.

Among the unique accounts identified, 69,372 accounts submitted both WWE and AEW comments. That entails that 47.6% of WWE commenters were also AEW commenters. And 82.1% of AEW commenters were also WWE commenters.

How did you determine what comments were related to AEW or WWE?

The keywords used to identify AEW- and WWE-related comments were carefully but arbitrarily chosen to focus on the companies themselves, their executive leaders, and their major branded programs, rather than attempting to catalog every wrestler or personality.

• AEW keywords: ‘aew’, ‘all elite wrestling’, ‘dynamite’, ‘collision’, ‘rampage’, ‘double or nothing’, ‘all out’, ‘all in’, ‘forbidden door’, ‘tony khan’.
• WWE keywords: ‘wwe’, ‘raw’, ‘smackdown’, ‘nxt’, ‘wrestlemania’, ‘royal rumble’, ‘summerslam’, ‘triple h’, ‘levesque’, ‘nick khan’, ‘hhh’, ‘mcmahon’, ‘vince mcmahon’.

To avoid ambiguity, as each comment’s sentiment was analyzed as a whole and not in part, any comments that contained a keyword from both the WWE and the AEW lists were not included in the data analyzed here.

In the cases of “rampage” and “collision”, those words were only counted beginning on June 1, 2021, and April 1, 2023, respectively, just a few months before those AEW television programs debuted. Including these words earlier may have caused comments to be erroneously identified as AEW-related.

Adjustments also had to be made for keywords “collision”, “forbidden door”, and “dynamite”. The former two inherently carried a general negative value (think “forbidden” having a negative connotation) and “dynamite” carried an inherent positive value. All WWE keywords and all other AEW keywords used in this study had a neutral inherent value.

Sentiment over time for all the selected individual keywords can be compared using this interactive chart:

Open the interactive chart in a new tab

Why not include wrestlers’ names in your keywords?

The intent of this study was to identify comments where sentiment was likely directed toward the company, its leadership or its major programming, rather than isolated performers or storylines.

AEW and WWE have large and changing rosters. Some wrestlers (including high-profile ones like Cody Rhodes and CM Punk) appeared with both companies during the timeline. Maintaining a current, non-overlapping list would have added complexity without proportionate analytical value.

Furthermore, the nature of fandom around individual wrestlers posed a risk of distorting the results. Fans often develop intense, personal investment in specific wrestlers, leading to sentiment that reflects excitement, frustration, or loyalty toward individual talent rather than broader opinions about the company itself. Including wrestler names would have shifted the analysis away from the intended focus — measuring sentiment toward AEW and WWE as organizations — and toward capturing volatile reactions to the careers, performances, or booking of particular performers.

How did you determine whether the sentiment of a comment was positive, negative, or neutral?

Sentiment analysis was calculated using VADER Sentiment Analysis, which has been used in numerous academic studies.

VADER (which stands for Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner) is a rule-based sentiment analysis tool that’s specifically designed for social media text that often consists of short comments and informal language. VADER assigns each comment a compound score, ranging from -1.00 (extremely negative) to +1.00 (extremely positive) based on the presence of words and phrases found in VADER’s manually curated sentiment dictionary, combined with intensity modifiers like punctuation and capitalization.

In simpler terms, VADER has a list of thousands of words that people usually think of as positive or negative. For example, words like “great” or “amazing” make a given score higher. Words like “terrible” or “boring” lower the score. The tool also accounts for things like exclamation points, all caps, or adverbs like “very” that are used to express stronger feelings. All the words in a given comment were taken into account and their sentiment values added up (hence “compound score”) to decide whether a sentence measured as positive, negative, or neutral overall.

What the data tells us

These findings reflect a broader reality that’s emerged in the wrestling industry over the last several years, this data aside: namely, that AEW’s favorability with engaged fans rose through 2022 before entering a sustained decline thereafter, while WWE’s favorability increased in recent years. That story is supported by other metrics including TV ratings and live event attendance.

While the correlation isn’t overwhelmingly lockstep, this analysis supports a notion that trends in online fan sentiment, when measured across a forum as large and active as r/SquaredCircle, are meaningfully related to trends in these wrestling companies’ consumer-driven businesses. That relationship may seem intuitive to those unacquainted with how wrestling fans are often perceived by those inside and outside the business, but it’s a notion often dismissed. When sentiment is tracked systematically and at scale, though, rather than through anecdotes or viral reactions, it begins to actually align with trends in attendance and possibly other engagement metrics.

This is more evident in AEW’s case.

While a sample of just fourteen data points limits the ability to draw firm predictive conclusions, linear correlation is applied here to impose a strict, quantitative test on the relationship.

Quarterly averages show a strong linear relationship between sentiment toward AEW measured here and attendance of its weekly television events (Dynamite, Collision, and Rampage). The correlation is high (R=0.8218), and the coefficient of determination (R²=0.6754) suggests that about 68% of the variation in AEW attendance can be statistically explained by changes in sentiment within this community.

Open the interactive chart in a new tab

Open the interactive chart in a new tab

The correlation for WWE’s weekly TV events (Raw and Smackdown) is weaker (R=0.6840, R²=0.4679), but far from random. WWE’s higher baseline attendance and more entrenched brand might insulate it from swings in sentiment—or maybe AEW fans are just more online than WWE fans.

But it’s notable that while WrestleTix estimates of tickets distributed for Raw and Smackdown have sequentially continued to increase (and doing so despite rising ticket prices), sentiment for WWE on r/SquaredCircle peaked in mid-2023.

Open the interactive chart in a new tab

Open the interactive chart in a new tab

Of course, correlation doesn’t establish causality. Fan sentiment doesn’t by itself drive attendance or ticket sales, nor would I suggest attendance strongly shapes sentiment (though there may well be something to the notion that a wrestling event in front of a big crowd adds to a wrestling fan’s positive experience). Nonetheless, this study does point to a significant conclusion: online sentiment, when measured at scale and averaged over time, moves in alignment with at least some key business indicators.

The suggestion here isn’t that online sentiment entirely predicts business outcomes in the wrestling industry. That’s especially so when contrasting against business-to-business revenue streams like guaranteed media rights payments. But the sentiment of a large fan community like r/SquaredCircle, when measured over time and at scale, can’t be easily dismissed and may be a meaningful signal.