As noted earlier, WWE today announced financial results for its first quarter ended March 31st. The company announced revenues of $176.2 million, making it the highest quarterly revenue in WWE history. Benzinga has an article here about WWE shares dropping nearly 7% today, despite the record quarter. They noted that the stock originally jumped, but fell when “less-than-anticipated WWE Network subscriber numbers were released later in the day.”
In the quarterly earnings release, WWE revealed that the Network had 1.327 million paid subscribers as of March 31st, nearly double the number of subscribers reported on the day after last year’s WrestleMania. Here are more numbers regarding the Network from the release:
* Through Match 31st, the WWE Network had attracted nearly 1.8 million unique subscribers with 74% of these subscribers active as of that date.
* During Q1 2015, 94% of total subscribers accessed WWE Network at least once per month. WWE Network subscribers watched an estimated average of 53 hours of content per household over the quarter.
* WWE Network added 511,000 subscribers to reach 1,327,000 paid subscribers at March 31, 2015, representing a 63% increase from year-end 2014. The subscriber growth reflected the acquisition of 795,000 subscribers, which was 13% above the gross subscriber additions in the prior year period from the network’s launch through WrestleMania (February 24, 2014 – April 6, 2014).
* WWE Network attracted an average of approximately 927,000 paid subscribers for the first quarter 2015, representing a 29% increase from the fourth quarter 2014 average.2 The network’s February free promotion contributed to that growth, attracting approximately 201,000 trial subscribers, of which 154,000, or 77%, converted to paying subscribers in March.
* At quarter-end, WWE Network had approximately 196,000 international subscribers.
