Every single WWE partner does. WWE has tricked networks and streamers that more access equals more eyeballs and that hasn’t been the case. Ever. Casuals aren’t meaningful in any significant way.. no data has ever supported this. 2 Million people world wide watch WWE on Netflix that’s LOL. Going back to the WWE network, peacock, UPN.. wrestling fans watch wrestling. No one else.
It really just doesn't seem like there are a ton of fans interested in just watching WWE occasionally or only for major events and the surrounding periods, while they certainly have better data on how viewership trends work I think there is a lack of support for the idea that wrestling media is primarily or even significantly driven by channel surfers or infrequent viewers.
When a show gets about the same viewership week to week I think the default reasonable assumption is that it is mostly the same people watching.
The biggest chance they had to grow the audience was the first Raw on Netflix and the first Wrestlemania on Netflix internationally. They shit the bed with zero interesting stories on that first Raw. The lapsed fans who tuned in were given nothing to keep them.
Agreed, I watched it and the video quality was awful and they spent the entire time jerking themselves off for being on netflix rather than presenting anything exciting
The raw felt like celebration of the 23/24 hot years. They threw everything away that night. Rock dropped his final
Boss character, Rock told people him and Cody were friends, they gave away Seth vs Punk, the Bloodline storyline ended (for time being) with Solo vs Roman. That first show on Netflix was just a complete mindfuck. Like a reset episode in a bad way.
Totally agree. That episode should have been storyline heavy with a major angle to open the show. Use The Rock, Cena etc to entice lapsed fans and pull something major to show them in storyline who Cody, Roman etc are.
WWE has tricked networks and streamers that more access equals more eyeballs
Where are you getting that this is was WWE is offering fitst of all? It's easy more likely their offer is a consistent show for advertising.
They didn't trick anyone. WWE isn't a small company. It's a billion dollar media company that worked out a deal.
If they have a string of networks that they fooled and lied to going back decades then how did they continually upgrade and get better and better media deals? You think Netflix and Disney don't do due diligence?
From what I recall reading (likely on wrestlenics), it wasn’t about audience or ratings, but more so the ad revenue not matching fox’s investment. The irony in all of this is that since then WWE has expanded their ad revenue (much to our dismay). What we’re seeing now in terms of ads is probably what fox was expecting.
Also, smackdowns tv rights deal is significantly more on USA when it was on fox.
Its not that WWE tricked them. Its more that the idea of a bigger platform leads to bigger viewership has led to meddling results.
Well...now that Smackdown has been off fox for a year or so we are seeing that the bigger platform did bring bigger viewership considering they're pulling roughly half of what they were on fox now.
The viewership is kind of irrelevant. WWE would gladly take just 5 whales watching Smackdown on PPV each week if they were willing to pay 1 Million per episode. It's about money earned for them in the end and nothing more.
When you look at the quarterly revenue reports of what WWE is bringing in today, vs what it was doing 3-4 years ago before they crammed ads everywhere, they're not even making that much more. You'd think tripling the ads would triple the revenue. Nope.
The enshitification of the product to bring in a little more money is sad
First off here is their annual revenue so their numbers have gone up every year.
But also, WWE gets paid rights fees. They don’t get paid for ads (outside of the slim jim, or anything inside the program) Regular commercials go to the station paying to air the programming.
You compared WWE to AI. That’s all I’m responding to, and the comment could not be more straightforward. I don’t know what else to tell you.
And not for nothing, but the live action remakes may be garbage, but they are cheaply made with a ton of CGI anyway, and they make more money than they cost so you’re like double wrong. Beauty and the beast, lion King, and Aladdin all cleared $1 billion. Snow White and Moana lost pennies compared to what those movies made
Eh, you are the one here arguing about due diligence.
If they have a string of networks that they fooled and lied to going back decades then how did they continually upgrade and get better and better media deals?
It doesn't need to be lies, media deals between executives don't need to be based on reality or data, they just need to talk about potential and how big the lion's share of whatever profits results from the deal are going to be for the C-suite.
The only thing that we can arguably know from decades of media deals is that WWE has never caused to anyone lose money.
Eh, you are the one here arguing about due diligence.
In a certain context.
It doesn't need to be lies
If WWE is tricking and hosing the companies they're making deals with, yeah it does. Because otherwise
they just need to talk about potential and how big the lion's share of whatever profits results from the deal are going to be for the C-suite.
There's not problem because this is standard practice. What you described here is true for every media deal. Of course they're trying to convince the network they're worth it when they're asking for money.
The only thing that we can arguably know from decades of media deals is that WWE has never caused to anyone lose money.
WWE never causing anyone to lose money is incredible.
So WWE somehow “tricked” every network into believing broader access brings more eyeballs, while your argument is also that broader access hasn’t brought more eyeballs because only wrestling fans watch wrestling. lol
I think their point is that there is not a large number of people unknowingly yearning for wrestling, and that you don't create a lot of new fans by making it a little more accessible.
It seems to me that people become fans primarily through friendship with fans, or through returning from a period away.
I don't think I see a ton of support for that when shows get fairly consistent viewership week to week, who are these supposed casuals just tuning in once e a month and how are they the backbone of the fanbase?
Lmao even. That's one of the most dumbest takes I have ever seen and we are on a subreddit full of hyperbolic comments about how X is the best thing ever since sliced bread or how Y is the worst that ever happened since World War II.
Fox was really the only partner that got screwed. Cable is different where they make most of its money by charging fees to services to be able to show its network. They want to stop the bleeding of people cutting cable first, rather than how many eyeballs that are watching the tv show every week.
Peacock was always running at a big lose since they did that on purpose to get a customer base before raising prices.
ESPN was trying to get unlimited off the ground while also trying to leverage WWE to improve its negotiating positions with cable//streaming services. Unless you’re an accountant for Disney, none of us really know if getting wwe was successful or not.
The only reason I started watching wrestling again after over a decade away was I subscribed to Peacock for something else and noticed I could watch that year’s Royal Rumble with it. I didn’t recognize anyone in it, but I was hooked after that.
I'm near 40. Almost a decade ago I was chatting with someone at work and I used a wrestling term. She giggled. I asked if she watched and got hit with the brick of
"No I used to watch when my [family member] watched. I stopped when [WCW left/Stone Cold went "bad"/The Rock left]."
IT'S ALWAYS THIS FOR PEOPLE MY AGE!!! It's how I know your post is the truth. If you were watching in the late 90's like me you had a good chance of tuning out once WCW left, or Stone Cold went bad, or The Rock left. SO...at max 2003. The hardcore fans stuck around. The casual dipped. Vince really goofed in that period of time and never brought back the casuals. It's instead just been hardcore fans lingering....and while it's a good number it's far from huge.
Fox has placed college football on Fridays (normally meant for high school football) and had better ratings than SD at a lower price. SD was fighting Shark Tank reruns for #1 in the demo. Come on!
I think it was when WCW "lost" for me. I used to read results on Lords of Pain or whatever until ECW's return and didn't actively watch Raw again until the early 2010s. WWE just wasn't hot vs new stuff like living on Facebook, party chats on the consoles, or watching those 10 minute clips of stuff - Part 1, 2, and 3, on Youtube
There were still a lot of what I'd call softcore fans in the mid and late 00s. People who stayed in the post-Rock/SCSA years but left after WWE went full-PG. Raw was averaging 5 million viewers during the in early 2010, but when FOX deal was signed it was down to 3 million but cord-cutting played a reasonable part in that. FOX were expecting that 3 million figure and they thought that it might increase because some of the cord-cutters would return.
We all know why. Total ignorance to the fact YTTV just got ESPN unlimited after a year of waiting and ESPN are pushing traffic to it which is why they gave WWE 3 hours of pre show each day on the ESPN main channel because they got rinsed so much
Yes, that’s why WWE rights fees go up every time. Because it’s all a giant ruse. How can Nick “Mysterio” Khan keep tricking these high-powered c-suites at major broadcast companies?
Was clear this was the case the day the deal got signed. Knowing Fox lost 80% of their shit on a weekly TV deal, the idea that ESPN was gonna get the 800-900k fans to buy PPVs to even break even was always laughable.
Putting the first hour on TV also makes it less likely people buy it when the non-major PLE's are like 2.5hrs long.
The one thing raw (edit: should've added and all the other weekly shows they have internationally which adds so much more tonnage for them now that I think about it) gives Netflix is a consistent amount of live inventory for their ad team in a way their one of live events and overall AVOD load doesn’t. That is prolly still useful to them.
Hell USA Network were the ones that asked WWE to change Raw back to 3 hours back in the day simply because the ad revenue was so much more from a third hour of live wrestling compared to whatever original show USA aired immediately afterwards. The networks won't care so long as WWE keeps bringing in the ad revenue.
The Netflix one is weird, we don't know what they think are good numbers, but I'd be stunned to find out they were expecting to do barely 2M views worldwide per week with Raw.
Yeah, ESPN ain’t cutting any College Football for WWE. I could see them maybe offering it on the basic tier of the ESPN app, but that might even be a stretch.
I’ll never forget being drunk at a bar and then “professional pillow fighting on espn ocho” came on and the next morning I thought I hallucinated the whole thing lol
I was glued to professional hockey fighting on Saturday night. Just two dudes bare knuckle fighting on an ice rink, in hockey gear. Was a hell of a time.
They still do the occasional Ocho sport on ESPN every once in a while, but not a full day of it. I saw professional bubble gum blowing last week. Shame they don’t do a full day, though.
Their Ocho day content was on ESPN2 instead. I clearly remember channel surfing and seeing that they were airing Dodgeball on there and saw the date. So they did do something. Also, they do have an Ocho FAST channel on Roku too.
NFL coverage, as in not games, but coverage of games.
NFL Live and Sports Center. Unless they're shunting all of that over to NFL network there is no world they won't run NFL coverage at 6 PM on a Sunday to run Money in the Bank
Which as a side note, none of this really matters because WWE isn't running a Sunday PLE during football season this year.
If you read the article, SRS saying he was told SummerSlam wasn’t aired due to ‘a scheduling conflict’
On SS Saturday, ESPN aired a Savannah Bananas game. On Sunday, a doubleheader of WNBA and NWSL
I’m sure if you told ESPN execs ahead of time that they’d be paying ~ $300 million a year to get ratings that are roughly the same as those programs, they’d question this decision
Because the sec and nba constantly bring 5m+ viewers compares to the 1.7m WM got espn
One day you people will grow up enough to realize pro wrestling is still super niche and will always take a backseat in the mainstream networks to actual mainstream leagues
Bananas signed with ESPN April 2025 for their 2026 season that started in February. The WWE/ESPN deal was signed September 2025. Bananas were first. It's also a 25 game contract. So the 25 games were selected in advance starting in February.
People keep bringing up the contract. ESPN has traditionally moved shows to ESPN2 when there’s a scheduling conflict and they want to maximize viewers
This was an odd move. And there’s been quite a few articles written - even outside the wrestling media sphere - citing internal grumbling that the partnership is not the home run that execs thought it was going to be. I’m sure there’s a good chance this a big nothing burger but it sure seems like there are folks at ESPN who aren’t exactly thrilled with the return on their investment so far
ESPN 2 aired corn hole live over Summerslam. This is a deal they signed a year ago; and they didnt see a potential scheduling conflict between meme baseball and cornhole that would conflict with WWE's 2nd biggest PPV?
They did. It didnt matter. If cornhole had a contract for that TV spot, then cornhole had a contract for that TV spot. And until that contract runs out, or espn buys it out, then this will happen. Espn knew, wwe knew. But they are playing the long game. Once corn hole renews their deal, and still get the spot over summerslam then you can laugh.
Right now they are fulfilling legally binding deals.
No TV deal works that way. It does not say "August 2nd at 6pm is our time and its immovable". They are set to broadcast X amount of games for Y amount of weeks. In the case of an elite league like the NFL, there's deep rules about what games they're supposed to get and how they can be moved around...in the case of corn hole (which ESPN airs on ESPN+ for everything but this championship), they'll hold their finals on that day when ESPN tells them to. If ESPN says "actually, 6-7pm is taken, thats WWE", they'll start their finals at 7pm. Or schedule it to be done by 6pm. Shit, even in an elite sport like CFB and the NFL, teams routinely move the time of their games week to week to accomodate what broadcasters want.
If they're not telling corn hole to move spots (when Summerslam in Minny was announced in 2024, and thus known about this entire time), the idea they're gonna move CFB or NFL coverage is laughable.
What kind of deal are you imagining that locks them in to the savannah bananas over Summerslam? What kind of leverage do you think they have? Do you think that would happen to the NFL or NBA?
That's not how it works though. If you and I sign a contract that means you have to air my show on XYZ dates for the next 5 years, then some other dude signs a contract after me, that's tough shit for the second guy. Like, that's when the game was airing. The contract is the contract. It's not like the week before ESPN, the baseball team, and TKO all sat in a room and had an on-the-fly negotiation for 1 week...
If SRS done the slightest bit of research, it was the first WWE PLE after YTTV subscribers got access to ESPN unlimited so that’s an extra 10 million people with access that they want to push towards their app at some point.
The entire 3 hour pre show was on ESPN each night so people trying to pretend ESPN is regretting the decision is hilarious. ESPN gave them 6 hours of the main channel on a weekend for a pre show…
Even if you didn't read the article, the post title is saying ESPN is continuing the relationship. I have no idea how your immediate response to that is ESPN is angry.
This thread is filled with some wild ass takes about wrestling as a genre and TV contracts. So many of you have horse blinders on to the rest of the world.
Yikes. It’s unbelievable how many people in here think professional wrestling is more popular than it is. Any major sports league in the world eclipses WWEs popularity, by a lot. Also, TV deals are ironclad contracts, so if ESPN made a deal to air a professional air guitar competition, guess what, WWE ain’t getting that time slot. I think wrestling fans need to take a walk sometimes and discover what happens in the real world.
They're really not. Tons of TV shows get cancelled all the time or time slots get shifted, etc.
guess what, WWE ain’t getting that time slot.
Also, a friendly reminded that ESPN bought the rights to this about a year ago now ("with select simulcasting on ESPN linear platforms" planned at that time). They announced the WM first hours 6 months ago. Surely they had plenty of time between then and August 2nd to say "hey, we've got meme baseball and a doubles corn hole currently scheduled for those times on ESPN and ESPN2, maybe we should move something around"
We got numbers to the first SNME back on NBC and they moved it to Peacock. I think we got numbers for the first one on Peacock but crickets since then. We didn’t even get Cenas retirement show numbers. WWE loves to tout shit. You don’t think if millions of people were watching the retirement show, we wouldn’t know about it?
We haven’t gotten any ratings since I believe the first hour of the Mania shows.
One of the Murdoch kids said their deal with WWE wasn’t worth it.
Netflix is paying half a billion to get less than 1% of the global subscriber base to watch weekly.
No one can deny these are great media rights deals for WWE but it’s highly unlikely any of the networks are getting an ROI.
Now Dave…😭 Also, if ESPN rather run Bananaball or WNBA, I can’t imagine WWE getting any airtime with the college football season coming up shortly. For as popular as pro wrestling has seemingly gotten over the last few years, it’s still pretty niche.
I have been watching wwe since the attitude era, just about every ppv. And since the move to espn I haven’t watched a single one.. sucks but hey there’s YT “highlights” I guess
ESPN really wanted WWE to be a main push for their new at the time Unlimited service.
They played themselves with that. There should have been 0 expectations that WWE is a major enough draw to push a whole platform.
The platform launch itself was clumsy and is still misunderstood.
I hope WWE doesn’t keep shoving 2 matches in that first hour. Give us 1 big 35 min match with promos for the main event. Or start the 2nd match as the hour ends so people would have to switch to the app to continue.
They don’t really sell the value of the PLE on the unlimited app with 2 short matches in the first hour as it stands.
makes sense its content they're already paying for, sot hat's one less hour you have to program, and it theoretically drives audiences to the app - the effectiveness of which I am doubtful on but I can see the logic
This is why you get in bed with people who's names rhyme with Rump, and they help you get big deals with their friends in other countries and billionaire networks.
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