CM Punk Flaunts The Success Of His AEW Segments On Instagram
For the second time in less than a week, CM Punk is getting increasingly vocal about AEW in his Instagram activity. First, last Thursday, he replied to a post about Dax Harwood's plea for Punk and The Elite to "make it work" so they can all do business together with one simple word: "Duh." Now, on Tuesday, he's added more fuel to the fire with a post to his disappearing Instagram story:
In the Story post, which will drop off his page by around 2:35 p.m. ET on Wednesday, Punk shared an image of a graph displaying data collected by Brandon Thurston/Wrestlenomics showing the most-watched videos on AEW's YouTube channel that were uploaded in 2002. The top two both feature the former AEW Champion: His August 10 return from breaking his foot and the last few minutes of the February 9 Punk/Jon Moxley vs. FTR match that set up Punk getting a rematch against MJF. The fourth also features Punk, though not in the video title: The full August 24 Punk-Moxley match to unify the two versions of the AEW World Championship. The rest of the listed videos feature Bryan Danielson or Jeff Hardy in some form, with just one exception: Keith Lee's surprise debut.
It should be noted, though, that the list does not rank cumulative views at the time that Thurston put it together: It goes by view counts scraped at specific numbers of hours since the video was first uploaded. This is quite arguably the fairest comparison, but as they sit right now, Wheeler Yuta joining the Blackpool Combat Club has the most overall with 6.4 million, with Punk/Moxley-FTR in second place at 5.1 million and Jeff Hardy's debut in third at 3.2 million. All others on the list are currently at under 3 million as of this writing.
Punk has been sitting out to recover from surgery to repair a torn left triceps muscle, an injury he suffered at All Out in September. He's also gone almost completely unmentioned on AEW programming since then due to the fallout from the brawl he initiated with the Young Bucks and Kenny Omega that same night.