Why Cagematch shouldn’t be indicative of how fans think about the WWE product

Is it just me, or lately, does it seem like everybody who wants to criticize the WWE product is using either Cagematch ratings or YouTube numbers to prove that WWE is bad right now and fans don’t like what the company is giving them?

I’m not going to talk much about YouTube, since it’s been proven that those numbers can easily be manipulated to go the way users want them to. But I do want to go into more detail about Cagematch, which I feel isn’t the great point of reference it once was.

At first, the site was a great place for fans to go, talk about wrestling, and rate shows. It was so popular that every wrestling fan would go on the site and subscribe just to have their voice heard. That was a great time, and it did help give an idea of what the IWC liked and didn’t like because you had a lot of fans voting.

Depending on how big the show was, you could get up to 1,000–2,000 votes. So this was our version of Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, or Letterboxd—but now, it’s pretty much a ghost town. Yet wrestling news outlets and social media bloggers still use it as a reference to spin the narrative that WWE’s product is hated by fans, even though most shows have fewer than 100 votes.

So why is this happening? Probably because, even though the site is outdated compared to social media, it’s still the only way to get some sort of idea of how a show is perceived by fans. But does it really represent what fans truly think about wrestling right now?

To make my point, I’ll use some stats from the website and then compare them to equivalent ratings for movie fans on Letterboxd.

Cagematch ratings

Last Friday’s SmackDown: rating 0.58, number of votes 167
AEW Collision (last Wednesday): rating 6.5, number of votes 47
AEW Dynamite (last Wednesday): rating 7.2, number of votes 112
NXT (last Tuesday): rating 6.74, number of votes 42
Last Monday’s Raw: rating 5.83, number of votes 83

Letterboxd ratings

Super Mario Galaxy: rating 3.0/5, number of votes 109k
The Drama: rating 3.8/5, number of votes 124k
They Will Kill You: rating 3.0/5, number of votes 34k
Ready or Not 2: rating 3.4/5, number of votes 85k
Project Hail Mary: rating 4.3/5, number of votes 787k

As you can see, when you look at these numbers, you can get a pretty good idea of what movie fans love and don’t like, based on how many people go out of their way to review and rate. On the wrestling side, it’s really the vocal minority that goes on Cagematch to vote, and it’s not a great representation of what the fandom truly thinks about the product.

In the end, I get that for some people, having a place like Cagematch as a reference helps promote the narrative that a certain product isn’t liked by fans. But when you don’t even have a strong sample of fans going to the site to vote, does the Cagematch rating really matter? For me, it doesn’t. You can’t get a strong idea of what a small minority of the fandom thinks about the product when fewer than 1,000 fans are voting.

So why do we still give the very vocal minority a voice? Because it’s great clickbait and makes a compelling story when a bad Cagematch rating comes out—even if, in reality, that rating truly means nothing.