In the second annual iteration of this study (see last year’s here), sentiment toward AEW improved in 2025 while sentiment toward WWE declined, based on an updated analysis of discussion on Reddit’s largest wrestling forum, r/SquaredCircle, with nearly 1 million weekly visitors. The 2025 data is a reversal for AEW, whose sentiment had been in decline on the subreddit since peaking in mid-2022.
This analysis made use of more than 600,000 comments from 2025 alone and a total of more than 5.7 million comments across a timeline of just over seven years, displayed in the charts below. The methodology will be detailed further in this article.
Wrestling fan sentiment, quantified here at scale, is often dismissed as fickle or unrepresentative. We don’t need to resolve or discount that issue to nonetheless consider the trajectory of the sentiment values demonstrated here over a long course of time. Even if the sentiment of a subreddit is discountable as a mass-market indicator — which it may well be — the change in that sentiment across millions of data points suggests a change in how products are processed by its core audience.
That being said, while we found last year a more mathematically significant correlation between live event attendance and sentiment with a set of quarterly data points, that correlation weakened with the addition of data from 2025.
However, it’s worth noting that, according to WrestleTix estimates, Dynamite’s average attendances showed signs of improvement in 2025. After many quarters of year-over-year declines in average estimated tickets distributed, Dynamite slightly improved the second and fourth quarters of 2025 (up 8% and 6%, respectively). The first and third quarters were down more severely, still (-34% and -35%, respectively). Possibly more in line with the data observed here, the first quarter of 2026, which just ended, saw Dynamite attendances up 15% from the prior year. Collision attendance, however, have continued to sink year-over-year. TV ratings are difficult to analyze given changes to Nielsen’s methodology in recent months, though, viewership for both Dynamite and Collision (though not the P18-49 audience) is up year-over-year so far in 2026. Ultimately, what has been a largely negative story for the direction of AEW attendances and TV ratings from 2022 to 2024, has more recently become a more positive but still mixed story.
Picking up where this study left off at the end of 2024, throughout 2025, discussion mentioning AEW subjects became more positive, parting ways from what was essentially a tie between WWE and AEW sentiment throughout 2024 and most of 2023.
Sentiment related to WWE, meanwhile, declined somewhat throughout 2025, the opposite direction from AEW’s recovering trend.
Note that the data collected and charted here ends with December 31, 2025, and does not extend into 2026.
The wider history of the data here favors AEW, despite it being a distant second to WWE in terms of basically every economic indicator. AEW, nonetheless, solidified its place as the #2 wrestling company in the U.S. as it renewed its crucial media rights deal with WBD, which became active upon the beginning of 2025, paying AEW somewhere between $170 million to $185 million annually through at least 2027.
Discussion on r/SquaredCircle about WWE appeared to be considerably heavier than AEW. Through 2025, there were just under 40,000 comments per month that this study identified as exclusively mentioning our selected WWE keywords. That contrasts against comments with AEW selected keywords (and no WWE keywords), which actually declined as the year went on: from just over 17,000 comments per month early in the year to around 10,000 by the end of 2025.
Unsurprisingly, April, the month when Wrestlemania took place, was the peak month for WWE comments.
The peak for comment volume for AEW was during July and August, the months during and right after All In, the company’s biggest show of the year.
Methodology (largely repeated from last year’s article on this subject)
Data for ostensibly every comment in r/SquaredCircle’s archive through the end of December 2024 is available through Academic Torrents, which this study relied on. 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 an 81.6 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 could 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.
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 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.
Brandon Thurston has written about wrestling business since 2015. He operates and owns Wrestlenomics.