The recent announcement by Ring of Honor (ROH) that they will be running bimonthly pay-per-views (PPV) has wrestling fans wondering what this means for the promotion. Fans are wondering if PPV is the tool that ROH needs to make itself a national promotion and whether ROH’s position in the PPV market make it a bonafide competitor to Total Nonstop Action (TNA) and World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE)?

From what we know of ROH’s plan for PPV so far, the promotion looks to be running a two hour taped show every two months. The first PPV is set to debut in July (with the show that’s being aired actually taking place in May) and early reports indicate that the show will be priced somewhere between ten and fifteen dollars. It’s also known that the PPV will be carried by some but not all cable and dish networks.

While PPV is certainly an exciting new step for ROH, anyone familiar with the promotion’s history has to realize that it is just another of the promotion’s many small steps in the road to financial solvency and overall success. The fact that ROH is running PPV’s does not make it a national company nor does it make it a major rival to the WWE as WCW was for so many years. The PPV shows are a natural expansion of ROH’s slow but steady plan for growth.

Since its debut in 2001, ROH has worked hard to build a small but devoted base of fans presenting a no frills presentation of solid in-ring action featuring some of the best workers both nationally and internationally. More importantly, ROH’s innovative business model of relying on DVD sales of its arena events as its primary source of income has allowed the promotion to make a profit, something TNA is still toiling to do. ROH’s success hasn’t come overnight. Rather it’s been a steady course of small steps taken to build the promotion up without overextending itself.

One of the biggest challenges for a fledgling business is when the time comes to expand. Initial success creates the opportunity to build an enterprise into something bigger but too much too soon can be just as deadly for a business as more than a few entrepreneurs have had the unfortunate experience of success going to their head and overextending themselves into bankruptcy.

Apparently ROH’s Cary Silkin has learned the lessons of past promoters who went too big too soon. During the mid 1980’s Bill Watts and Jim Crockett Jr. both learned the harsh realities of what happens when you expand your business too quick. Their respective promotions of the Universal Wrestling Federation (UWF) and Jim Crockett Promotions (JCP) both went out of business after they went from regional promotions to national promotions too quickly.

While ROH has reportedly been turning a profit for at least a year now, it’s still a very small promotion with very limited financial resources, something its fans need to realize when they equate PPV with instant status as a national company. Unlike TNA, ROH doesn’t have a money mark that is willing to spend millions of dollars despite the business failing to realize a profit. ROH. ROH has always taken small steps in building itself whether it’s been expanding the area where they run shows or working with other promotions. PPV will be no different.

The fact that ROH now has a PPV deal doesn’t mean the promotion is suddenly going to be flush with money. First off, any revenue derived from PPV will take months to arrive in ROH’s coffers as PPV companies are notoriously slow in delivering the profits to the content providers. Second, if the price of the PPV’s is around ten to fifteen dollars, that’s not a lot of money when you consider that PPV companies have traditionally taken at least fifty percent of the revenue from PPV buys. Third, consider that ROH is feeding on itself in order to run a PPV. ROH normally runs a live event and then produces a DVD of the event for fans to purchase, usually around twenty dollars a show. The PPV show thus will be taking the place of one of their DVD products with ROH likely bringing in less money than they would if they sold the show on DVD.

That’s not to say that PPV is a bad move for ROH. Bimonthly PPV’s could be a good way to introduce fans to the ROH product who may have heard of ROH but who haven’t gone to a live show or purchased one of their DVD’s. There’s more than a few fans who feel that fans burnt out on the WWE and TNA will get hooked on ROH’s workrate oriented product. That in itself could justify the move to PPV.

Right now it’s way too early to gauge the impact of PPV for ROH. There are many factors to consider when looking at the likelihood of success or failure such as whether potential fans will be turned off by ROH’s lackluster production values, the fact that pre-taped PPV’s have historically fared poorly, and the belief that the PPV market may be saturated with wrestling. Countering these obstacles are ROH’s loyal fan base and ROH’s true status as an alternative to the WWE and TNA.

In the end, ROH’s move to PPV will likely be just one of the many small steps taken in the company’s growth with the move being successful but far short of earth-shaking. ROH may never be a national wrestling promotion but PPV should help in its continued growth and long-term success.