WWE’s Monday Night Raw has seen a highly successful debut on Netflix, as revealed by Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos during the company’s recent earnings call. Sarandos highlighted impressive viewership numbers, demonstrating the streaming platform’s ability to significantly expand the reach of the long-running wrestling program.
“WWE is off to a great start,” Sarandos stated. “Our 1st week, we drew about 5,000,000 views, which is about 2 times the audience that Monday Night Raw was getting a linear television, pretty consistent with how we modeled it, how we’d hoped to build the audience for the league.”
This shift to Netflix has not only boosted live viewership but also showed remarkable growth in non-live, on-demand viewing. Sarandos elaborated, “We also saw that the non live viewing, so in the day after the live event, our viewing grew by 25%, mostly outside of the US time zones. So this is a new viewing in the UK and Canada, Mexico, Australia, Brazil, particularly big markets.”
Domestically, the move to Netflix has also yielded significant gains. Sarandos shared that, “In the US, our viewing of Monday Night Raw was as big as the Monday Night Raw viewing has been in 5 years. So we’re super thrilled about how that’s going and how that’s coming out.”
In addition to the strong viewership, Sarandos emphasized Netflix’s focus on financial sustainability for its sports content. “Again, just not to be overly repetitive, but we are not we’re going to be mindful of the bottom line and it’s really important that those economics do work and that the big league sports, full league, full season economics are very hard to make work. And so for us, we want to be able to bring value to the sport like we have to date with WWE certainly, but have we like we have with the NFL too, where we were basically able to bring a big audience, a young audience, a more global audience than linear television, but that has to be reflected in the deal as well.”
The debut of Raw on Netflix not only marks a milestone for WWE but also underscores Netflix’s growing influence in the live sports and entertainment space. With strong numbers and increased global engagement, the partnership is proving to be a win for both brands.
