WWE President Nick Khan appeared on The Varsity with John Ourand to discuss various topics, including the Netflix viewership metrics they are interested in.
Khan said, “We’re interested in all of it. We want to know live viewers, we want [to know viewership] within the first 24 hours, viewership within the first week. WWE is one of the unique products where you actually don’t have to watch it live. Because it’s not simply — as you know, with let’s say the NBA, you must watch it live. Or between X and social media and texting and — this was established decades ago. If you didn’t watch it live, then someone would tell you the score and it blew the whole experience for you. WWE is different because it’s not so much just about, ‘Oh, Roman Reigns won this match.’ It’s, ‘How did he win the match? What’s the storyline involved with it? What was the outcome after the match?’ That matters for WWE viewers. It’s part of why our presence on social media is so significant, the numbers I mentioned earlier. So, we want live viewership. We want ads, what are the ad space going for? Again, we want the delayed viewership. We want, ‘What countries is it working in?’”
On how the numbers can influence their global growth:
“For example, Netflix gave us a great note a year or so ago. They said, ‘Hey, when you go to Spain for a night, obviously viewership spikes in Spain. But if you stay in Spain for over a week and you do two to three shows there, then we think a lot of that spiked viewership will sustain.’ Because it’ll acclimate the country to knowing, ‘Hey, WWE is here, boots on the ground.’ It’s not just an American company piping out American content, which I no longer believe that we are. It’s a global company looking to have a global footprint, which I’d like to think we’ve accomplished a lot of that — with, of course, a lot of room for growth.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
