Cody Rhodes appears in an advertisement for Drumstick. Credit: Drumstick
By Tyler Lauletta on

WWE hosted its second-biggest event of the year this past weekend in Minneapolis, with SummerSlam taking over the Vikings’ U.S. Bank Stadium for two nights of wrestling action.

It was just the second time that SummerSlam had moved to a two-night event, and it appears to be the new normal, joining WrestleMania, which shifted to a two-night extravaganza in 2020 and has not looked back since. Across WWE, Premium Live Events — PLEs, formerly known as Pay Per Views or PPVs before the streaming era shook things up — are getting bigger.

The company’s two biggest live events are now both two nights and regularly hosted in football stadiums with up to 70,000 people in attendance. The next two biggest events of the year, the Royal Rumble and Survivor Series, are also now regularly hosted in football arenas. Further, with NXT (the WWE’s developmental program) hosting its own PLEs, plus more elevated international events like this year’s Clash in Italy and the return of Saturday Night’s Main Event, there is simply no shortage of premium WWE content for fans to consume.

But while there is clearly more wrestling programming available for watching, fans have expressed frustration with the amount of actual wrestling in that programming.

More ads and longer entrances are eating into the time of actual matches

The lack of wrestling at the biggest events in sports entertainment became a major talking point at WrestleMania earlier this year. As Roger Jackman wrote for Uncrowned back in April while comparing this year’s WrestleMania to editions from one and two decades prior, “The amount of broadcast time taken up by actual wrestling matches has dropped from 51% at WrestleMania 22, to 43% at WrestleMania 38, to just 34% this year.”

Where is all of that time in the ring going? Some of the drop can be attributed to the ever-more-elaborate entrances that have become a staple of WrestleMania. Several wrestlers have entrances that are just as important and involved as the performance they put on in the squared circle. Even more to the point, with WrestleMania now in football stadiums, the entrance ramp is physically a lot longer and takes more time to walk.

If the trade-off for in-ring entrances was just for more elaborate entrances, the shift would bother a healthy portion of fans, but would also be fair enough for others who love the pageantry of professional wrestling. Unfortunately, there’s another far more frustrating fiend taking over valuable PLE time: commercials.

The numbers from WrestleMania 42 paint a not-so-pretty picture

Jackman noted that just 10 years ago at WrestleMania 32, there were roughly three minutes and 49 seconds of ads, while at WrestleMania 38 in 2022, there were about six minutes and 10 seconds of commercials. Notably, WM38 was the last Mania before WWE’s merger with TKO. At WrestleMania 42 this year? Jackman counted 40 minutes of ads, noting that the number was based off of the archived broadcast for Netflix in the UK, meaning that some of those breaks had been slimmed down.

Another analysis by Jordan Mendoza at USA Today Sports found that by his count, nearly 20% of the WrestleMania 42 broadcast was commercials, and that out of 13 matches over the course of the weekend just four went over 15 minutes. Shorter matches means less in-ring storytelling and less time for narratives to build within the match. At WrestleMania, as many matches as possible should feel like an epic conclusion to whatever story has led up to the encounter, and when the time you watch actual graps is cut down, it hurts the final product.

Mack Rawden explained the stakes well for CinemaBlend after WM42:

Anyone who watches a lot of wrestling can tell you that there’s a gigantic difference between 8 minutes and 12 minutes. The latter allows you to slow it down and tell a fuller story. … It’s really hard to achieve the same level of surprise in under 10 minutes, and it’s really hard to make it feel like a proper WrestleMania match without more time. In theory, ‘Mania is supposed to be a showcase for these performers to bust out new movies and build upon what we see on Raw and SmackDown every week. It’s supposed to be a moment for them to rise to the occasion and show what they can do, but that’s nearly impossible when they’re getting less time than they normally get during run of the mill television matches that mean nothing in the grand scheme of things.

If you were hoping that the greater ad load would be held to Mania weekends, SummerSlam was a tough wake-up call. This time, it was wrestling podcast Getting Over crunching the numbers, and the year-over-year drop-off in match time was bleak.

WWE’s chief PLE problem is match time. Smart folks can disagree about booking. Ads are annoying but commonplace.

The match time being unnecessarily truncated is maddening and unnecessary. This YOY look at Night 2 encapsulates it perfectly.

More on tonight’s show. #WWE #SummerSlam

[image or embed]

— Getting Over: Wrestling Podcast (@gettingovercast.bsky.social) August 2, 2026 at 10:25 PM

With shorter matches and more commercials despite access coming via a paid yearly subscription to ever-changing streaming services (ESPN currently holds the belt), Premium Live Events simply don’t feel all that premium.

One awkward advertising moment from SummerSlam felt particularly brutal

Beyond matches getting shorter and the ad load increasing, it also must be stressed how WWE shoehorns in ads to what should be wrestling-centric moments at these events.

On Sunday, Chad Gable earned the first singles title of his WWE career, submitting Penta to win the Intercontinental Championship. Gable, a Minneapolis native, lifted the title in his hometown in front of a massive crowd. His family joined him to celebrate the moment in the ring, as did a dog mascot for Mug root beer.

Gable was game to play along, chugging down root beers like he was Stone Cold, but man what a way to waste a moment. Did anyone know Mug root beer even had a mascot? Could this not wait for Gable’s title celebration on Monday night?

For comparison, let’s take a look at the moments that preceded the arrival of the root beer dog.

That’s the sound of thousands of fans cheering “You deserve it!” for a veteran wrestler that finally reached the mountaintop. It’s a great moment! And as fan reactions to the sequence made clear, it’s a moment that everyone would have preferred was allowed to stand on its own.

The Mug moment would be frustrating on its own, but it’s made worse by the fact that the load of literal commercials is also way up. If the price of a PLE uninterrupted by actual ads was a visit from the Mug mascot, maybe that would be a bit more tolerable. When the Mug mascot is the cherry on top of a sundae already filled with regular ads, it’s understandable that fans would call foul.

WWE is not alone here. More ads are the new normal as streaming services that were once ad-free have shifted to tiered pricing that puts ads in the face of more fans. Pausing your television has now been turned into fair game for ad placement. In 2026, facing advertisements is just price of doing business when it comes to watching content.

This is our new normal, and until the downside of adding more commercials outweighs the cash those ads can bring in, the equation is only going to continue to get worse.

About Tyler Lauletta

Tyler is a editorial contributor at Awful Announcing, with previous stops at Sports Illustrated and Business Insider during his career covering sports in digital media. He is, begrudgingly, a Truster of the Process and general Philly sports sicko.

View all posts by Tyler Lauletta