Netflix CEO ‘super thrilled’ with WWE’s strong start on streaming service
Despite not debuting on the platform until 2025, WWE was a major topic of discussion on Tuesday’s Netflix 2024 fourth-quarter earnings call.
Netflix Co-CEO, President & Director Ted Sarandos said that WWE is off to a great start on the streaming service. He also noted that Netflix hopes to grow WWE’s reach outside the United States by exposing it to new markets.
Sarandos said:
“WWE is off to a great start. Our first week, we drew about 5 million views, which is about two times the audience that Monday Night Raw was getting on linear television, pretty consistent with how we modeled it, how we’d hoped to build the audience for the league.”
Sarandos says next-day numbers for WWE have been growing viewership by 25 percent, mainly from international markets.
“We also saw that the non live viewing, so in the day after the live event, our viewing grew by 25%, mostly outside of the US time zones. So this is a new viewing in the UK and Canada, Mexico, Australia, Brazil, particularly big markets. So we’re really thrilled to see how that’s going so far.”
“In the US, our viewing of Monday Night Raw was as big as the Monday Night Raw viewing has been in 5 years. So we’re super thrilled about how that’s going and how that’s coming out. Again, just not to be overly repetitive, but we are not we’re going to be mindful of the bottom line and it’s really important that those economics do work and that the big league sports, full league, full season economics are very hard to make work. And so for us, we want to be able to bring value to the sport like we have to date with WWE certainly, but have we like we have with the NFL too, where we were basically able to bring a big audience, a young audience, a more global audience than linear television, but that has to be reflected in the deal as well.”
Also, during the call, Sarandos noted that the media traditionally hasn’t paid much attention to WWE, but that is changing now that it is on Netflix. He pointed to this as an example of Netflix’s “X Factor.”
Sarandos later added:
“All these years that WWE has been on television, very successful. Good example about the kind of X factor that is Netflix, we did a press day to kind of introduce the press to the sport because the press didn’t pay much attention to it — to the sport until it got to Netflix. So they basically — we had a huge attendance of reporters from all over the world who were learning what this game, what this is about. So to me, I think that’s the first step of the X factor that is Netflix for that sport, and people will see that applied.”
Sarandos compared Netflix’s strategy with the company’s strategy for Formula 1, stating that while the plan was to grow F1’s popularity inside the United States, the plan with WWE is to expand its reach outside the United States.
“What excited us about WWE at the beginning, it’s the inverse of Formula 1, which is it was very well distributed in the U.S. and very little known outside of the U.S., where when we got into before Drive to Survive, Formula 1 was barely watched in the U.S. And now obviously, it’s incredible live events and ratings have gone up many folds. So I feel like we have the ability to do that with WWE. We give a bigger audience for it in the U.S. and blow it up outside of the U.S.”
“We also like it because for a sport, it also has a 40-person writer room. So it’s much closer to our core wheelhouse of creating and storytelling.”
Transcripts from yesterday’s earnings call are available here.