WNS Column: The State of the WWE Network

Although only a few months old, the WWE Network has been around long
enough for us to speculate about its future, and I personally think its
future looks bright… as long as you’re willing to power through some
growing pains.

Pretty much everyone who signed up for the Network on day one spent the
bulk of the next week drinking in as much classic WWE as they could
until they were drunk on fond memories, classic matches and forgotten
vignettes. The die hard fans who needed to have the Network got the
Network and it has become a welcomed addition into their homes. But what
about everyone else? Are they willing to part with $9.99 a month to see
Razor Ramon push someone into a fountain? Evidently not.

Subscribers reached their peak at Wrestlemania 30 and have been on the
decline ever since. Undoubtedly most of those subscribers were casual
fans who have a tradition of watching Wrestlemania and couldn’t resist
the price tag. I’m sure WWE had planned that many of those casual fans,
what they sometimes calls lapse fans (watch for a few months, leave for
a few months, repeat), would have seen the ample bounty presented by the
WWE Network and would stick around. But as with most things, you see
exactly what people actually want when you ask them to open their
wallets and for most casual fans three hours of wrestling on Monday
night turned out to be more than enough to satisfy their appetite and
WWE’s stock tanked because things didn’t go as planned.

The good news for the rest of us regular watchers who buy shirts and
tickets whenever WWE comes to town, is that their Network isn’t going
anywhere. There are 500,000 die hard fans who want their Network the
way kids in middle America ‘wanted their MTV’ and that’s enough to keep
it alive, but it won’t be an easy road to keep everyone happy .

The way I see it, the next few years for the Network are going be be a
roller coaster of ups and downs and the first speed bump is going to be
sometime in September when those initial 6 month commitments are drawing
to a close. The WWE stock shareholders that still remain be watching
very closely to see how many subscribers choose to renew and it’s
inevitable that a large amount will choose not to. By then, most fans
will have their fill and they’ll just watch the PPVs at a friend’s house
if they must. At that point, the stock takes another hit and that will
set in motion the eventual price increase of subscriptions and many more
subscribers will be lost in the same way as when Netflix barely raised
their price. The absolute die hard fans (and wrestling t-shirt websites
who use the Network as a business expense) will remain and pay basically
whatever they tell us to.

But then one day in the not-too-distant future another TV station or
brand will create it’s own online network just like the WWE Network. And
then another, and then another and then another. Within years every
major Network has an a-la-carte option where for a few dollars a month
you pick and choose exactly what channels you pay for and the WWE
network, the veteran of online networks, will capitalize when everyone
has had their fill of paying obscene prices for cable. They’ll drop the
price to far below the $9.99 once considered a bargain, and every man,
woman, and child who ever cared in the slightest about WWE will gladly
shell out the few dollars they’ll be asking for and Vince will be a
billionaire once again.

Of course all this is speculative and we’re not Wall Street gurus, we’re
just two dudes who sell wrestling t-shirts online, but we’ve been fans
all our lives and it’s safe to say that the WWE has always adapted and
provided their fans with what they want. And what their fans want
(every fan, not just us die hard fans) is the WWE Network beamed into
their house for significantly less than $9.99 a month. We firmly
believe that the WWE Network is well ahead of its time and once the
model that they created becomes the standard, you’ll still be watching
Razor Ramon push someone into a fountain, but it will cost much much
less than $9.99 a month.

Derek Lindeman
@TopRopeTuesday
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