WWE announces free tier for WWE Network

WWE launches free WWE Network subscription tier.

The WWE is a content-generating goliath that provides wrestling entertainment on both network television and through the WWE Network. On Monday, WWE announced an updated free tier that will provide various forms of content to interested viewers. This comes at a time where there’s growing speculation around a return to the PPV model in some form and potential interest within the WWE to licensing its content on other streaming networks.

According to the press release, the free version of the WWE Network will include multiple benefits. Viewers will have access to new shows such as Raw Talk, original series, past episodes of flagship programming and past PPV events. The previous version of the WWE Network provided access to all the above, along with the full catalog of WWE PPVs for $10 a month. This also included a continued promotion of a free month with a new subscription.

The success of the WWE Network has been a topic of conversation within the professional wrestling media for the past few months. In April, the WWE revealed a historic metric of $960.4M in revenue but this came at a time when WWE Network revenue was down as paid subscribers dropped 9 percent by the end of 2019 as compared to the same time in 2018. Also, April was the same month in which the WWE completed staff layoffs at a time when they were on pace to set this revenue metric. It was reported that there were 1.3 million paid subscriptions during that call as well. The highest reported number of paid subscribers was 1.8 million which was reported back in April of 2018.

WWE potentially moving back to PPV model

During that same conference call, WWE CEO and Chairman, Vince McMahon, hinted at the idea that WWE is looking into new ways to provide it is PPV content.

“Well, we have a lot of options. We could continue on as we are now, with a free tier and a more enhanced paid tier,” McMahon said during the conference call, audio provided by FightFul.com “Right now there’s no more better time to exercise the selling of our rights to all the majors who, quite frankly, all the majors are really clamoring for our content. So that could be a significant increase, obviously, in terms of revenue.”

Expectations are that the WWE will make gradual changes to the type of current PPV content that will be available on additional tears of the WWE Network. The WWE’s newest competitor, All Elite Wrestling, leverages a PPV model and its recent show Double or Nothing has seen reported buy rates of 115K to 220K. It will be interesting to see if the WWE makes an adjustment to its PPV model considering this news to continue to push it is growing yearly revenue.