Netflix CEO Reveals WWE Goal Following ‘Great Start’ On Platform

Netflix CEO Reveals WWE Goal Following ‘Great Start’ On Platform WWE, Netflix

With WWE Raw now three episodes into the Netflix era, the streaming giant’s CEO has commented on the show’s performance thus far and their goal for the future.

Speaking at the Netflix 2024 fourth quarter earnings call, Netflix co-CEO, President & Director Ted Sarandos said he was “super thrilled” at the strong start WWE Raw has made on the platform, while outlining plans to expand the product’s reach further in global markets.

Commenting on WWE Raw’s big debut episode on January 6, Sarandos commented on the show drawing around five million viewers:

“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 would then reveal the boost next-day viewers of Raw had had on the show’s viewership, particularly in 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.”

Sarandos would then comment on the added “X factor” that being on Netflix has brought to WWE, drawing more outside eyes to the product:

“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.”

He would then make a comparison between WWE and Formula 1, revealing aims to give the the product a similar boost to eyes that aren’t familiar.

“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.”

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Transcript via F4WOnline

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2 weeks ago by Jamie Toolan

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