10 Things You Didn't Know About WWE In 2015
8. WrestleMania 31 Did 137,000 Pay-Per-View Buys
The 2014 launch of the WWE Network was so needlessly aggressive that it took a service people actually loved and made them start to resent it because of a fairly reasonable price point.
Those within the company became obsessed with the $9.99 element of the offering, to such an extent commentators were mentioning it more than the vast array of things to actually watch, t-shirts were sold (presumably at a higher price) with it printed across the middle, and Vince McMahon himself raised a flag atop Titan Tower that made it appear as if the building was part of an elaborate car boot sale.
Most egregious were the chats between Michael Cole et al about how stupid the audience were if they still happened to order shows the old fashioned way. Why spend $60 on one show when Nine Ninety-b*stard-Nine would get you the lot? A reasonable question when not posed by a gang of obnoxious d*ckheads, but one perhaps ignored as a result.
Over a year after the Network's launch, 137,000 punters ordered the event the old fashioned way. Subscriber numbers and minutes-watched were the statistics most key to the shareholders and executives, but the better part of $8,000,000 in effectively free money almost vindicated some of the company's overt customer causticity.