WWE’s Monday Night RAW has made an impressive debut on Netflix, according to Co-CEO Ted Sarandos, who shared key viewership insights during a Netflix earnings call. The show’s first week on the platform attracted approximately 5 million views, doubling its previous audience on linear television and exceeding Netflix’s expectations.
Sarandos highlighted RAW’s growth in international reach, noting a 25% increase in non-live viewership the day after the event, primarily from markets like the UK, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and Brazil. In the U.S., Raw achieved its largest audience in 5 years, demonstrating robust performance in its home market as well.
He also emphasized the financial viability of Netflix’s sports content strategy, stating that they aim to bring significant value to sports while ensuring economic sustainability. Sarandos pointed out that Netflix’s ability to deliver a young, global audience aligns with their partnerships with WWE and other major leagues like the NFL.
Here’s what Sarandos said:
“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 on 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.
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’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.”
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