4128990 That would be a very long post, but it basically boils down to the entrenchment of the top wrestlers and an inability for management to find the next big thing to ride. Once Scott Hall, Hogan, Nash, etc. got hot with the NWO angle, Eric Bischoff and company didn't know when to quit with it, and they basically sacrificed every other wrestler on the NWO alter. When the fans got tired of the NWO, there was no one left to turn to because the NWO had destroyed everyone so thoroughly over the years.

The top guys at WCW were very political and made sure that basically no one on the card could move up into their spots. They were all making a lot of money, and WCW management was lazy and unwilling to discipline bad behavior. Up and coming wrestlers routinely had their legs cut out from under them when they got too popular.

Once WCW's number started to drop due to the WWF riding that Stone Cold/Rock wave of the Attitude Era, Eric Bischoff thought he'd pull off a coup by hiring Vince Russo away from WWF. Russo was Vince McMahon's head writer at the time, and was considered to be the main reason that WWF had pulled ahead. Vince Russo was given a lot of leeway to make changes. This freedom cost WCW dearly. What basically happened was that Russo was outed as having some great ideas, but many, many more terrible ones. It cemented Vince McMahon as a wrestling genius, since he was able to pick the good from the bad. Without that filter, it all hit the TV, and much of it was extremely terrible, like David Arquette (the actor) winning the WCW championship or trying to create a wrestling product based on the idea that wresters were "going rogue" from the script and going into business for themselves. Since 95% of the viewing audience didn't visit behind the scenes wrestling websites and didn't have insider information, the "going rogue" stuff flew over their heads. To most of the audience, wrestlers were just acting randomly weird.

WCW also signed people to HUGE contracts, and that came back to bite them in the ass once revenues started dropping. They were incredibly disorganized, often forgetting that they had people on payroll and not calling them in or using them for months at a time. WCW also flew the whole roster everywhere, all the time, because they changed their shows at the last minute so much. There are a billion more examples of how much money they wasted due to poor management, but that's the basic idea.

Ultimately, though, it came down to the network. WCW lost its spot on television because Ted Turner lost control of his company. He'd always supported WCW because wrestling helped him establish his Super Station in the 70s. When Ted Turner was outed from the board, WCW lost its support. If they'd been making money, then it probably wouldn't have happened, but see above...

In the end, a company that was worth hundreds of millions once was sold to Vince McMahon for something like four million dollars. That's how badly they'd run their company into the ground.