Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos addresses viewership numbers for WWE RAW

During a Netflix earnings call, Co-CEO Ted Sarandos addressed WWE RAW’s viewership numbers on the streaming service…

“WWE is off to a great start. 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. 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. So we’re really thrilled to see how that’s going so far.

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. 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.”