TheWhig.com is featuring the latest column from Tommy Dreamer where he talks about the inaugural House of Hardcore event back in October 2012 and discovering his event had been pirated online.
“To run a wrestling event, you need advertising, which costs money. I ran commercials during Monday Night Raw and SmackDown, as well on radio. In all, promoting the show cost me roughly $5,000. I also had to choose whether to do an Internet pay-per-view (IPPV) or showcase the show on DVD, or both. I chose to do just a DVD, which was made available a month after the show. The IPPV costs about $1,500, while my DVD post-production costs were about $1,000. You can see how the costs climbed long before even one ticket was sold.
The DVD was released and I consider it mildly successful, having sold about 400 units. I was alerted to a website where it could be downloaded illegally and saw that my show was viewed more than 600 times, which ripped my heart out and made me very angry. This was just on one website. I know this is a huge problem, not just for me, but worldwide. I’m fairly easygoing, I don’t mind clips on YouTube, but quick math tells me that 600 times $20 — $12,000 — well that is money that could have been used for future shows, advertising or other budgetary things. I’m just a small-time promotion. I can only imagine the mass pirating that WWE must deal with.
Because of all of this, I will probably just not make House of Hardcore 2 available on any format and go old school. Thus, I will cut my costs and make it a must-see, live only event. If you are not there, you’ll miss out.”