He wanted to know how it affected paydays. Nobody had an answer. The model is immaterial. In terms of growth, the model isn’t the issue, it’s the lack of content.

PPV was already dying. Further, PPV revenues were split with carriers. Further still, the buy rate gap between Mania and some of the b/c level PPV’s is staggering. Mania might yield a much bigger payoff overall under the PPV model, doing in the ball park of a million buys in a given year, but those secondary shows often do less than a hundred thousand buys. A million subscribers at 9.99=steady revenue (more or less). Five years from now we’ll see how they’ve grown the product, but there’s no denying they abandoned a sinking ship in the PPV business.

A major issue is the lack of content. Sounds weird considering they’ve got an unreal amount of content in terms of PPV’s alongside their DVD documentaries, Rivalries and whatnot, but there are glaring holes.
While the collection of PPV’s is staggering, there are massive gaps that don’t allow us to watch them in context. There are years of programming such as WWE Superstars, WWE Challenge, etc. WCW Saturday night is completely absent. Far more egregious is the lack of Monday Night Raw, Smackdown, and Monday Nitro episodes. Shit, even Thunder, though that’s not a huge loss. There’s a ton of PPV material to watch but it would be nice to go back to the weekly shows that built these PPV matches. We get the first….. I dunno, year and a half worth of Nitro which is nice, but why not give us the entire collection? Same goes for Raw. For as much as they worship at the altar of the Attitude Era, so much of it is nowhere to be found unless we’re watching the umpteenth retrospective or a documentary of an AE star. I’d rather watch those episodes and follow along en route to the PPV climax of those stories.

I do think WWE is a bit delusional with their projections. They average what, four million (Nielson) viewers for Raw and Smackdown? They probably averaged around 300,000 PPV buys a month. I think I read that they expect to get about 3 million subscribers at some point, which would basically be three quarters of their flagship viewers and (estimating here) ten times their average PPV buyers. Given the discrepancy between average PPV buys and viewers, it’s an awfully large leap to project that many subscribers even with the price cut and included PPV’s.

I think they’d do well to add some sort of mutant blend of Spike and ABC Family, offering a small slate of original content along with shows that fir their demographic. It seems like a no-brainer to offer some form of content from NBC, for example. Even if it’s just SyFy and USA content. Viacom seems a natural partner for certain things (strike a deal to feature Comedy Central Roasts, maybe even shows like Naruto, for example). This obviously depends on preexisting contracts and I don’t know that they want to put too much non-wrestling content up there, but you get the point.

If they can move forward with strategic partnerships and offer some other form of content besides wrestling but captures the same demo, then they’d have a real shot at building something with upwards of 2 million subscribers. That’s easier said than done, especially with the cost of such content, but that’s still the direction I think they should be headed. There may be an issue in terms of how that additional revenue benefits wrestlers when WWE is paying for outside content, but since wrestlers are paid per appearance and such content would most likely be an upfront licensing fee, I think it would still benefit the wrestlers overall.