The slice of the entertainment budget in every field went down. You ask any creative, they will tell you that their niche is already overstaurated, losing audience and is hopeless. At least the skaters don't have to face the prospect of being replaced by AI...atm.What I wish is that something could be done to bring back professional skating as a popular entertainment. Back in the day the goal of a female skater was to win a few amateur contests (hopefully a national or world championship or the Olympics) as a teenager to establish her credentials, then sign on with a big time ice show for a long and lucretive carreer. This was the standard model at least from the 1950s to the end of the 1970s.
Janet Lynn was successful as a teenaged amateur and then signed a multi-million dollar contract with Ice Capades which made her the highest-paid female athlete in the word. Dorothy Hamill won the Olympics (she quipped at the time, "It was either get the gold medal and become a millionaire or get silver and go back to my job as a secretay in Chicago"), made a lot of money off merchandizing, and when it was her turn at the big time she actiually bought the Ice Capades. But the show went bankrupt sopn thereafter.
By the end of the1990s the disctinction between "amateur" and "professiona"l (or Olympic elegible) was largely erased, in part because the Olympic movement dropped the concept of "amateurism" and in part because the ISU swooped in to seize control over all skaters and all skating and fit them to its mold.