WWE's Netflix era kicked off on January 6th with WWE Raw premiering on the platform.
On the January 6th episode of WWE Raw, The Rock thanked Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos for putting WWE on the platform.
During the Netflix fourth-quarter earnings call (via Investing), Sarandos commented on WWE's start on the streaming service.
“WWE is off to a great start. Our first week, we drew about 5 million views, which is about two times the audience that Monday Night Raw was getting on linear television, pretty consistent with how we modeled it, how we’d hoped to build the audience for the league.
“We also saw that the non live viewing, so in the day after the live event, our viewing grew by 25%, mostly outside of the US time zones. So this is a new viewing in the UK and Canada, Mexico, Australia, Brazil, particularly big markets. So we’re really thrilled to see how that’s going so far.
“In the US, our viewing of Monday Night Raw was as big as the Monday Night Raw viewing has been in 5 years. So we’re super thrilled about how that’s going and how that’s coming out. Again, just not to be overly repetitive, but we are not we’re going to be mindful of the bottom line and it’s really important that those economics do work and that the big league sports, full league, full season economics are very hard to make work. And so for us, we want to be able to bring value to the sport like we have to date with WWE certainly, but have we like we have with the NFL too, where we were basically able to bring a big audience, a young audience, a more global audience than linear television, but that has to be reflected in the deal as well.”
He continued, “All these years that WWE has been on television, very successful. Good example about the kind of X factor that is Netflix, we did a press day to kind of introduce the press to the sport because the press didn’t pay much attention to it — to the sport until it got to Netflix. So they basically — we had a huge attendance of reporters from all over the world who were learning what this game, what this is about. So to me, I think that’s the first step of the X factor that is Netflix for that sport, and people will see that applied.”
WWE Raw has ranked in the top five global shows during its first two weeks on the platforms.
Fightful has coverage of WWE Raw every Monday beginning at 8 p.m. ET followed by a post-show review podcast on our YouTube channel.
