WWE Trades Ruthless Aggression For PG | Wrestling Timelines
June 26, 2018 | The Worst Era Ever Works
At long last, the goal is reached. WWE secures an enormous rights fee, announced on June 26, 2018.
The beleaguered, desperate USA Network matches the highest offer made for WWE Raw in what, contrary to 2015, is an intense bidding war. USA will pay WWE a mammoth $265m per year for Raw. In a move that shocked even USA, FOX buys the rights for SmackDown, paying WWE $200m across a five-year deal for its stigmatised B-show. That is a billion dollar deal. In total, between Raw and SmackDown, WWE will earn $475 million per year. Dave Meltzer writes in the June 4, 2018 Observer that new signing Ronda Rousey is key to FOX’s faith in WWE. Is this really the successful result of a calculated, years-long marketing campaign? Or has WWE benefitted from the wider television landscape in such a way that the preceding decade might not have mattered all that much?
Of course, WWE is not getting this deal if it’s a toxic mess perceived to be responsible for brutal waves of non-stop death - but the move to PG (and the subsequent piles of cash earned by WWE) is not necessarily the result of causation.
The trend of cord-cutting - i.e., American homes dropping cable packages and opting instead for cheaper, ad-free streaming platforms like Netflix - terrifies the TV industry, which is facing a genuine existential threat. In April 2019, PCMag publishes a graph of net subscriber losses faced by the largest cable service providers that simplifies the alarming decline. In 2014, 125,000 people dropped cable. This number ballooned to 2,875,000 in 2018. Cable is too expensive, people watch stuff on their laptops and phones now, and there are no pesky ads on Netflix. The TV industry doesn't view ads as pesky, quite the opposite. Ads are the lifeblood of a dying medium. In response, the TV industry pays monstrous sums of money to the sports franchises that are a single shield against the encroaching enemy. Sports are “DVR-proof” because a game isn’t worth watching when it’s over. The thrill, the draw, is in the hope of a result turning your way in real time.
In 2018, streaming is the great unknown for sports. No established league has the appetite for risk, and this is quenched altogether by a frantic TV industry begging its last remaining draws to stay put.
This trend compounds a decline first initiated by the rise of the digital video recorder (DVR): a device that allows viewers to record their preferred content, watch it at a more convenient time, and skip the commercial break with the fast-forward function. Moreover, by the mid-to-late 2010s, Netflix is not merely the new, vastly more affordable outlet for licensed reruns, nor the video store replacement. Its critically acclaimed original programming is solidifying the platform as a sensation.
In years past, WWE needed television more than television needed WWE - which is why rights fees were so paltry, or why none were awarded at all under the ad revenue split model. Wrestling was a cheap product with no offseason. It wasn’t a huge asset; it’s more the case that it would be silly not to host WWE from time to time. The advantages just about outweighed the negatives.
Now, TV needs wrestling. True or not, and Dave Meltzer reckons that it is not, FOX is operating under the belief that, as a pseudo-sport, pro wrestling is “DVR-proof”. FOX - and later Warner, which backs the hot new upstart AEW - are now in a desperate enough position to resort to pro wrestling.
This is broadly how we’ve arrived at the insane paradox whereby WWE scores record, eye-watering profits at a time, 2019, where its product is so awful that it is ritually compared to WCW’s annus mirabilis of 2000. WWE is fundamentally broken, but prosperous to an unprecedented extent.