Netflix Pins Down YouTube’s No. 1 Sports Franchise, the WWE
Tuesday's news that Netflix would be the home of WWE's Monday Night Raw starting in 2025 made waves as the service’s first major foray into ongoing live sports content. And it is a huge step for Netflix. But the bigger long-term impact may come from the potential audience Netflix is acquiring by going outside of its typical viewers to acquire WWE rights.
Data from Tubular Labs shows the WWE was the No. 2 U.S. sports media & entertainment creator in Dec. 2023, with over 117 million unique viewers across YouTube and Facebook.
But from a watch-time perspective, the WWE was No. 1 by far, with 2 billion minutes watched across YouTube and Facebook (nearly double the NFL at 1.1 billion).
The biggest deal here, though, could be how unique this audience is relative to Netflix's – Tubular data shows the YouTube overlap between Netflix and the WWE was under 3% last year, which could equate to a big subscriber boost for the streaming service, and expanded messaging reach for advertisers.
As Anthony Crupi dives into at Sportico, Netflix paying $500 million per year for 10 years does cool off the fears about the sports rights bubble popping. There’s also the possibility that wrestling is a unique case. But that’s still a lot of money to shell out for live events, and shows that Netflix can now be seen as a more significant player in rights negotiations coming up (so, specifically looking at the NBA… but also MLB and PGA negotiations a little further down the road).
If acquiring Monday Night Raw rights works out for Netflix — and there’s a fair bet it will, even if streaming/TV audience overlap is significantly larger than what the YouTube data above indicates — then the service’s trajectory looks ready to skyrocket. That could give it the freedom to grab more live sports rights in the future. But also doesn’t have to, necessarily. For Netflix, that’s a pretty advantageous place to be.
