WWE Trades Ruthless Aggression For PG | Wrestling Timelines
February 24, 2014 | The Network
WWE wants a massive TV rights fee, and while the company is bullish about that prospect, Vince McMahon does not want to rely on it. He hates the media, and always has. As he set out in 2008, he likes reaching his audience directly. His audience won’t attack him. He likes the echo chamber. He likes feeling like a massive genius. There’s also a significant monetary benefit of launching the WWE Network, a long-held dream with which he hopes to abandon the pay-per-view industry and their cut of the money forever.
The Network launches on February 24, 2014, to the delight of fans. Yes, the constant shilling is too much (the service cost just $9.99!). Yes, the original comedy and reality-based programming is not good. But fans get every pay-per-view, every episode of Raw and SmackDown in the archives, every historical pay-per-view. They can watch the near-definitive history of WCW chronologically. The more curious fans can even go further back in time and watch a generous if incomplete serving of some of the best and most influential wrestling TV ever booked in prime Mid-South Wrestling and Jim Crockett Promotions. There’s just one problem: there aren’t actually enough WWE fans globally to satisfy shareholder expectations. In January 2014, WWE stated its goal of drawing between 2-3 million domestic subscribers. That number was not reached even by the total combined global customers at any point.
WWE tried to tout its success to shareholders by disclosing the minutes-watched metric, but to reach that, by the late 2010s, even B-level pay-per-views often reach four hours and change. This dreary filler content deepens WWE’s woeful creative malaise.
By the time WWE shuttered the service, around 1,320,000 people had subscribed to it. Annually, this earned the company approximately $132 million per year. While this is not unimpressive, Brandon Thurston of Wrestlenomics evaluates in 2021 that “the Network…has not produced an obvious return on the investment”. Thurston cites astronomical start-up costs of $66 million, the overly generous $9.99 price point, and the cannibalisation of existing revenue streams as key to why the Network fell “well short” of expectations bandied to shareholders. Co-Presidents George Barrios and Michelle Wilson were terminated in January 2020 in a move widely thought to be scapegoating exercise.
The Network was not a disaster, but it was a failure, in that it was more prudent of WWE to migrate less of the content over to Peacock - thus saving themselves the operating costs - for which NBC paid WWE around $180 million per year in January 2021.