WWE published their financial results for the months of April, May, and June today, and there's a LOT to cover, so it got its own post. After the break, I'll look at everything that was released.
All in all, revenue was up from Q2 2010. Analysts summed it up that WWE made more money while spending less, which is always the goal.
WM27 did much better than WM26 (and WM25) and was a huge boon for the company this year. Extreme Rules had a nice jump over last year, which is good. Over The Limit, the second WWE PPV in the month of May, dropped a pretty noticeable amount. I think it's really time to pare back to 12 PPVs a year, including Mania. Maybe give it one more year in this model and see how it does, but the 13th PPV hasn't done all that fantastically. I don't know how Capitol Punishment was a nice step up from Fatal 4 Way, though, so I hope we don't/don't think we'll see the latter concept return. Keep it in the PPV junkyard with Breaking Point (and Bragging Rights?).
Update: The effect of The Rock's return can't be overstated here. They're doing pretty solid sales for WM28. Promoting things for a while and giving them time to build is a good way of succeeding.
TV rights revenue was up due to more countries paying for Raw (and Smackdown?). Expanding internationally continues to be a good move. With no deals in the U.S. for NXT and Superstars (both of which they pretty much "stopped caring about" from a content standpoint), that number's not as high as it could be. Of course it's going to be hard to sell them to networks here when their ratings were unimpressive (and likely still are overseas). They shot themselves in the feet there. They could have done more to promote both of those when they were on the air to get ratings up.
Update: They sort of hinted during the conference call that NXT and Superstars could return to the air in the U.S. before the end of the year. I hope that's the case.
Live event revenue was down, even internationally. It seems they had less events, but charged more per ticket. It's hard to balance how many shows to do and where to do them, and obviously performers can only take so many bumps, etc.. However, when the product's hot enough, it doesn't matter as much. They're less down than they were in 2010, though.
Things like consumer products/merchandise were also up this year from last year. WWE All-Stars sold well, but Home Video earnings were down again. They don't promote those enough, I don't think. At least compared to the movies and what happened on Raw the previous week.
In most places, things aren't as good for the company as they were in years past, but they're at least improving from last year. It's a start and they're going in the right direction.
Revenue grew in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, but dropped slightly in Latin America. Percentage-wise, things shifted slightly towards North America. I think Mexico could have had a big deal to do with that.
They're changing WWE Films' releases to appeal more to their audience. Thank goodness! They lost $3.3 million on "That's What I Am". They're also cutting production budgets, which is a minor problem compared to people not caring enough to see the movies despite them being advertised constantly on their shows. They could also distribute the films internationally first. They either need to do movies that the people they advertise to want to see, or use that money elsewhere.
They might have a "pre-game" show before Raw each week. I think I'd skip that one. 3 hours of wrestling in a row is pretty taxing.
WWE Network continues to move along. It'll be very interesting to see how well that does.
They classified the meeting with Dana White as mainly a social one, so don't expect any kind of team-up between the companies.
They're planning more "Rivals" DVDs like HBK/Bret. GOOD. There are a good number of rivalries they could highlight.
Unsurprisingly, there's no inkling towards going private or teaming with another company.
WWE's stock dropped after their announcements, but the entire market took a hit, so this is likely unrelated.
It was announced that The Rock would be part of "multiple" PPVs going forward as we move towards WM28. Good move.
That's it for WWE's financial results. The rest of the day's news will be up in a separate post shortly. Thanks for reading!
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