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The official TNA website has a new interview with President Dixie Carter. Below are among the highlights:

When asked about TNA’s success over the past seven years:

“After seven years, we’ve come a long way. We’ve overcome some tremendous obstacles, but have a long way to go,” Carter said. “Until we are the biggest wrestling company in the world, we won’t be satisfied. And then with that comes another set of challenges, but I look forward to those challenges one day.”

“We’ve set very high, very realistic goals along the way, and I don’t think there’s been one (goal) that we haven’t met or exceeded,” she said. “We have not been infused with hundreds of millions of dollars, nor had a parent company that is a network. We have fought hard for every bit of success we have attained. We’ve done it fan by fan, success by success. And that, to me, is what makes TNA special, because it truly is a company of the fans; they’ve been the ones who have allowed us to grow.”

Such that “TNA iMPACT!” now regularly draws close to 2 million viewers on a weekly basis. As of late, “TNA iMPACT!” ratings routinely surpass the WWE’s ratings for ECW on the Sci-Fi Network. TNA is now focused on surpassing Smackdown in ratings, which is the WWE’s stalwart on Friday nights.

“I think we have accomplished more in the last six- to 12-months than we have in the last several years,” Carter said. “I look at our ratings over the last year, and they are up more than 20 percent.”

When asked about the ratings for WWE’s three main shows being relatively flat:

“We actually don’t want that to happen,” Carter said. “We want everyone’s ratings to go up. In order to succeed, we don’t think we have to take ratings away from anyone else. As a wrestling industry, we all have to grow the fan-base worldwide.

“We can’t just say we’re going to beat Raw (in the ratings). Right now, that’s unrealistic. We had to start with a more obtainable goal to beat the ratings of our competitor’s third-rated show, ECW – and we’ve done that.

“I have heard people say, ‘It’s not a big deal to beat their lowest rated show,’ but I disagree. It’s a huge success for TNA, which five years ago had just 300,000 viewers in a Friday afternoon timeslot on Fox Sports. So now we’re setting our sights on their second-rated show, Smackdown – and that gap has closed significantly over the past six months.”

Impact’s future – possible head-to-head battle with WWE:

“Nothing is set in stone, but no move is being planned right now. Our goal has always been to be competitive and go head-to-head against one of our competitor’s programs. So we hope that might happen sometime in the future.”

You can read the entire interview at www.tnawrestling.com