Stephanie McMahon OUT at WWE... resigned today. CNBC: "No deal with Saudis( or anyone) completed"

[JQ Legend]

what would happen to Cody's AEW lifetime world champion ban if they bought the E right before mania?

That was some of the stupidest shyt ever and I’m pretty sure it was Cody who came up with that idea himself to appease fans

He should have just said fukk it and got a world title reign out of AEW while there

 

[mannyrs13]

R=G got some competition

Both of the usernames do have a G and an R in them.

 

[CEO of Morgan Industries]

That was some of the stupidest shyt ever and I’m pretty sure it was Cody who came up with that idea himself to appease fans

He should have just said fukk it and got a world title reign out of AEW while there

The obvious thing to do would be to turn heel and break that promise, winning the title in the process. Deluded heel Cody thinking that he's as beloved by the common man as his dad was = money.

But this goof thought his MAGA act was a legit babyface act...and in front of an AEW crowd, too.

 

[Cattle Mutilation]

Vince already talking creative with HHH? Only a matter of time until Vince takes that over

 

[Raw Sauce]

Vince already talking creative with HHH? Only a matter of time until Vince takes that over

Hopefully Vince is just telling him

MORE SQUASHES PAL

 

[Saysumthinfunnymike]

"Vince defers final say.."

that don't sound Vince to me..

 

[itiswhatitis]

TK had to stop financing the game because it was costing too much money. Just because his dad is a billionaire doesn't mean he has an unlimited supply of money. They only get 45mil a year from WBD, and that gets eaten up quickly.

They are probably a tax write off for the Jaguars. I remember a Jaguars tweet talking about their “AEW division” or something to that effect.

 

[King Kai]

[WON] Morgan Stanley analysis for FOX on Smackdown.

-Morgan Stanley did an analysis for FOX on Smackdown and felt that they couldn’t justify the price tag for the show.

-In the 2020-21 television season, FOX paid $196.7 million on the show and ended up with $134 million in losses. In 2021-22, FOX paid $208.5 million and ended up with $145 million in losses. Current projection is $155 million in losses for 2023-24, and $166 million in losses for 2024-25.

-They concluded that there are not enough wrestling fans to justify the money they spent on Smackdown, and it's unlikely that that the number will go up in the next two years.

-They recommended that WWE take less money in their next deal to continue receiving the high exposure from broadcast television, rather than taking Smackdown to streaming or going back to cable.

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Saw random AEW fans celebrating this on twitter like this isn't bad news for wrestling TV deals in general.

 

[Saysumthinfunnymike]

Saw random AEW fans celebrating this on twitter like this isn't bad news for wrestling TV deals in general.

Push comes to shove... these TV deals are gonna be big.

 

[NoMorePie]

Sources say triple h and Vince McMahon will both pick a representative and they will battle it out and WrestleMania. Winning side keeps power

 

[MenacingMonk]

Those Fox execs are fukkin idiots. All they had to do was see the ratings decrease over the last 2 decades.

Who the fukk are these retards in power?

 

[Raw Sauce]

The reason the networks will pay for a money loser like WWE is because whatever else they would replace it with, be it original programming or syndication, will still lose more. Particularly on Friday nights, which is and always has been a death slot. These big networks have obligations to fulfill with their local affiliates so they have to give them something for every night, even the poorly performing ones. So yes, the networks will pay less this time around but it's still gonna be big money because the E is still better than the alternative.

 

[The Rainmaker]

Vince already talking creative with HHH? Only a matter of time until Vince takes that over

"Maybe"
"Defers"

Hahahahahahaha. Sure.

 

[Cattle Mutilation]

The reason the networks will pay for a money loser like WWE is because whatever else they would replace it with, be it original programming or syndication, will still lose more. Particularly on Friday nights, which is and always has been a death slot. These big networks have obligations to fulfill with their local affiliates so they have to give them something for every night, even the poorly performing ones. So yes, the networks will pay less this time around but it's still gonna be big money because the E is still better than the alternative.

Syndicated or unscripted content make bank for networks and are generally cheap

 

[TrueEpic08]

[WON] Morgan Stanley analysis for FOX on Smackdown.

-Morgan Stanley did an analysis for FOX on Smackdown and felt that they couldn’t justify the price tag for the show.

-In the 2020-21 television season, FOX paid $196.7 million on the show and ended up with $134 million in losses. In 2021-22, FOX paid $208.5 million and ended up with $145 million in losses. Current projection is $155 million in losses for 2023-24, and $166 million in losses for 2024-25.

-They concluded that there are not enough wrestling fans to justify the money they spent on Smackdown, and it's unlikely that that the number will go up in the next two years.

-They recommended that WWE take less money in their next deal to continue receiving the high exposure from broadcast television, rather than taking Smackdown to streaming or going back to cable.

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Just gonna quote myself from roughly 4.5 years ago here:

Live sports rights fees are on a run right now, and have been for roughly the past half decade. It actually has nothing to do with anything the WWE has done, it's just that the trend finally reached them (they tried to get in on this in their last rights deal, but it didn't work).

The thought is that live sports is one of, if not the only category of programming that is immune to the time shifting and online consumption trends that have affected channels and their parent companies since the mid-late 2000s. This is why it's not just WWE that's seeing massive increases in rights fees, but all live sports period.

However, I'm of the thought that this is a massive bubble brought on by the usual short sighted business thinking. Here's why: did all of the massive rights fees deals ESPN signed keep them from cutting hundreds of staff members and anchors over the past 5 years? Has it helped their ratings? Has it helped Fox Sports 1's ratings (if it did, they probably would have fought harder to keep the UFC rights)? My point is, it's not the sports themselves that are necessarily that important, but specific events like the Super Bowl, March Madness, the NBA Finals, and the Champions League finals that are truly immune to those downward pressures. As for everything else, they'll still attract live audiences, but those don't necessarily have to be TV audiences, and they're very slowly dwindling anyway (see the ratings decreases for the NFL and College Football).

Now, USA's basically wedded to RAW as long as Bonnie Hammer is chairman of NBCUniversal, so a lot of what I just typed doesn't matter right now. But if ratings and ad revenue keep falling for SmackDown, expect Fox to take a hard look at that deal sooner rather than later. If the bottom falls out for WWE on the TV rights front, then all of a sudden this live events problem that they seemingly don't care about is going to become a very real issue for them.

They don't have to care about always tarping off a third of their arenas for now. I'm not sure they're going to be singing that tune in roughly 5 years.

I get the feeling that their ultimate goal is complete independence from these pressures via the WWE Network. And that plan, in my opinion, trades on the wrestling fan placing more importance on the massive amount of classic programming on the platform than on how terrible and bland the original product is. In short, they want to exploit the wrestling fan's love of nostalgia to prop up their channel and ambitions (really disgusting shyt when you break it down like that).

The thing is, there are really only so many people who are going to pay $120 a year specifically for WWE programming and content, and I think they're closer to that threshold than they think right now (currently sitting ar around 2 million subscribers). It's an unsustainable plan, borne of ambitions propped up by inflated stock and rights fees. I might be wrong about where WWE's heading, but I get the feeling that they actually need to start getting in touch with what the fans want and like quick, fast, and in a hurry before things start going downhill.

In the short term, yes. I'm looking past the next 5 years with the notion that the whole rights fees boom is a symptom of larger negative trends re: cable television in mind. I call it inflated because the massive increase in live sports rights fees is the networks's way of attempting to stave off the inevitable changes to their business models time shifting and online consumption will necessitate (and despite their thoughts to the contrary, live sports are NOT immune to these pressures). Again, WWE didn't get those massive deals because of anything the company did, but because they were the last company in line to get that type of rights deal after every single sports entity in existence got one (if they were doing anything right, they'd have gotten this massive increase when the rights fees were up in 2014 instead of having to crawl back to Bonnie Hammer for a backhanded handout).

Beyond that, the downward trends in WWE's ratings, live events attendance, and quality, and the upward trend in the average age of their audience, are showing no signs of abating. So what happens when, 3 years down the line, ratings have decreased further, ad revenues aren't sufficient, more of their audience have aged out, and they still haven't solved their live events issues? Do you think Fox isn't going to take a good hard look at how much they're paying WWE for SmackDown? Hell, if it keeps going, even NBCUniversal's going to have hard thoughts about them at some point (remember, they were seemingly perfectly fine with the prospect of losing RAW and SmackDown in 2014).

I'm not here trying to predict WWE's death (the one thing the business side of the company has done is work tirelessly to make WWE death proof, with the Saudi deal being an example of those efforts). All I'm saying is that there's a real reason why, on the one hand, WWE's getting this massive influx of cash while also suffering very real problems when it comes to the actual wrestling side of the company. When those two meet, whether that be 5 or 10 or 20 years down the line, I highly doubt WWE comes out unscathed.

I wasn't 100% correct and things are still playing out, but it's fukking eerie how on the mark I was regarding this SmackDown deal.

One thing I don't address in these posts is the ad rate issue for wrestling. Ad rates for wrestling are far, FAR lower on average than those for other shows because of how these channels view wrestling's core demographic, which means that they either have to change the show to attract better advertisers that will pay more, or attract so many viewers that it won't matter what the content and demographic is and they'll pony up bigger bucks for the slots anyway. Vince promised FOX 3 million viewers and a 1.0 in the 18-49 demo when this deal was signed, and has failed miserably at delivering that. With all these factors in mind, it doesn't actually matter how many viewers SmackDown attracts after a certain point,. If I can make money on a show that garners a third or a quarter of the viewers because advertisers actually want to pony up for space on its programming and it's hitting its stated viewership goals, I could give a fukk about WWE's audience. They're doing less than nothing for FOX at this point.