Vince McMahon has announced that WWE Network has surpassed 1.3 million subscribers for WrestleMania 31. McMahon was making the announcement during his scheduled WWE Conference call, in which he also boasted about 142 worldwide trends on social media during WrestleMania. Clearly, the WWE has achieved a fantastic level of critical and commercial success around their annual WrestleMania extravaganza. Pessimism going into the show was unfounded, as WWE ended up putting one one of their greatest ever shows. Fan attendance at the event was 76,976, with a record breaking gate grossing $12.6 million. However, WWE stock is way down on McMahon's subscription announcement. At the time of writing, it is down over 9% and looking shaken. The reason for this is because Network subscriptions still don't have an average of more than one million paid subscriptions for quarter one 2015. The average is at the 918,000 mark. In order to boost this part of the business, WWE announced new shows for the Network and yet another free month for April. As such, the 1.315M paid subs as of 3/30/15 are actually a little misleading. An average subscriber rate over a million is still required for the company to feel good about their efforts and it absolutely seems desperate for the company to be doing yet another free month. Still, WWE should be proud of their efforts around WrestleMania.
