WWE News: WWE Reveals Record First-Quarter Earnings And WWE Network Subscribers
Four times a year, the WWE announces its quarterly earnings. Each time, the WWE Universe waits in anticipation when the numbers come out. Will the WWE report success? In the beginning of April, the WWE Raw episode on April 1 received the highest ratings in three years. The WWE Raw after WrestleMania garnered an average audience of 5.4 million people. For the WWE, that’s important.
As far as the more important figures, the highlights of the WWE first quarter results include a 40 percent increase in revenue. That brought the WWE to $176.2 million. It’s the highest quarterly report in WWE history. WWE’s OIBA (Operating Income Before Depreciation and Amortization) went from $21 million to $28.2 million from the previous quarter.
In a nutshell, the WWE’s financial performance surpassed that of the company’s public guidance, which is a very good thing. Lastly, the WWE Network surpassed 1.3 million subscribers, which is a 99 percent increase from WrestleMania last year.
To shed some light on WWE stock information, they announced a net income of $9.8 million, which is $0.13 a share. That is compared to the net loss of $8 million last year in April of 2014. Now, what did the CEO have to say about the resounding success of the WWE? Vince McMahon put out a statement on what the WWE Network is doing, as well as the WWE overall.
“During the quarter, we generated record quarterly revenue and strong earnings growth, reflecting our strategy to realize greater value from our content across multiple platforms.
“We believe that we are on a path to significant growth as we continue to expand WWE Network and innovate faster than ever.”
This is excellent news for the WWE because the better they do, the more their quality will increase. Now, that doesn’t sound like the two correlate, but WWE will be able to do more with WWE programming with the increased revenue. Also included in the report was the WWE’s buy rates for WrestleMania and WWE Fast Lane.
Approximately 259,000 WWE fans bought WrestleMania through pay-per-view avenues. That’s clearly down from 690,000 pay-per-views busy from last year’s WrestleMania. WrestleMania 31 has 1.326 million viewers on the WWE Network. This number was up from the 1.185 million viewers during WrestleMania 30 last year. For the entire first quarter, the WWE posted a total of $9 million in pay-per-view buys.
Does this mean the WWE Network isn’t doing as well as anticipated? That’s not fair to say because they do have over 1.2 million subscribers at the moment. With more original content to come, the WWE Network will only get bigger from here.
[Image via YouTube]
