WWE Network News: subscriber numbers, six month commitment

[Big Red Machine]

Source: INSERT SOURCE NAME HERE



Thursday, 30 October 2014 04:51


By Dave Meltzer & Josh Nason, Wrestling Observer

On what will be an interesting day for WWE, the world's top wrestling organization announced that their subscriber number as of 9/30 was 731,000 total, a net addition of up to 4% (31,000) since last quarter.

Over the last quarter, there were 286,000 new subscribers and 255,000 cancellations.

Considering they were available in 170 new countries and added Canadian TV (Rogers) since the last report, this is a terrible number.

Of the 286,000 new subscribers, 23,000 ordered the $12.99 monthly deal.

The network will be available in the same version as the U.S. in the United Kingdom during the month of November.

Thursday morning, WWE sent out an email to all Network subscribers announcing they were dropping the six-month commitment to the Network immediately and that the ongoing price monthly would be $9.99, cancel anytime. The WWE also released this video of Vince McMahon announcing that new subscribers can get November for free, heavily pushing Survivor Series. That explains going with a main event that would have bombed as a stand-alone PPV, because as a free offering, you don't need to have something that will make people spend money and the psychology becomes altogether different.

There were 703,000 subscribers listed domestically and 28,000 internationally.

Worse, the July PPV number, the prior B show, was 99,000 buys worldwide but September's Night of Champions fell to 48,000 worldwide, so more people stopped buying B PPV's than have been added to the network as subscribers.

For the three month period from 7/1 to 9/30, WWE took in $120.2 million in revenues and had $5.9 million in losses as compared to $113.3 million in revenue and $2.4 million in profits for the same period last year. The losses were well below expectations, based on budget cutting, so that is positive news.

As of this writing, WWE stock is down to $12.43. Their quarterly earnings conference call is scheduled for 11 AM EST, and Dave Meltzer and Bryan Alvarez will be on shortly thereafter with some breaking news audio to discuss the Network numbers, what it means for business, and other news from the call.

In an unrelated item, social media folowers has increased in the last three months from 365 million to 413 million, while house show attendance is down, and merchandise sales on the web are way up.