The traditional marker for success in WWE has been based upon how many pay per views are sold. It's a format which Vince McMahon first pioneered in the mid 1980's, transforming his wrestling shows to become something people could pay to watch without having to attend the arena. The concept worked brilliantly and by the late 90's we had monthly pay per view offerings which we bought with enthusiastic anticipation. Despite the often high cost for three hours of entertainment, WWE was regularly able to top over 300,000 buys at its peak. That's all changing now with the advent of the WWE Network, so it seems an appropriate time to look back at what the best performing WWE pay per views ever ranked as. Honourable Mention... It seems unfair to put WrestleMania 30 into this list because WWE can't actually account for the number of people who watched it. Officially it did 400,000 PPV buys but then there was also the 667,287 Network subscribers who could have watched it. WWE as you would expect have crowed that Mania 30 ended up being one of the biggest success ever because the combined PPV and Network number put it at over a million viewers. That seems a stretch. Not everyone on the Network would have watched, many of the subscribers would have been one of the 75,000 in actual attendance at the New Orleans show. Then you have the fact that fans will have watched in groups, with Mania gatherings now a popular occurrence. Added to this is the fact many Network subscribers went ahead and ordered the PPV to negate any worry they had about streaming it on the Network. As such we can't be sure how many viewers Mania 30 actually had, so for now we rank it as an honourable mention!
