Outside of McMahon family members like Stephanie and Paul Levesque, only three high-ranking executives seemed to hold on to their jobs during this tumultuous period: Kevin Dunn, the executive vice-president of television production; Michelle Wilson, WWE's chief revenue officer; and George Barrios, the chief strategy and financial officer. Arguably the toughest of those years was 2014, with Wilson and Barrios, in particular, playing key roles as the company prepared to go live with WWE Network while also negotiating new deals for its prime-time cable programs.
WWE Network had its much-anticipated launch in the United States that February. By the time WrestleMania 30 rolled around in April, however, the company reported that the online network had only 667,287 subscribers—far short of the 1 million executives had said they would need to hit in order to break even monetarily.
"It shocked people—stunned the market," said analyst Chris Harrington. That August, WWE rolled out the network to a laundry list of 160 countries a full four months ahead of schedule. "It was all in English—no translation at all," Harrington said. "There was no country-by-country specialization, and everywhere had the same [market price of $9.99]. That move showed their desperation."
Meanwhile, WWE's domestic television contract with NBCUniversal was up for renewal just a few weeks after WrestleMania. Despite some concerns that a new online streaming network might eat into the company's other revenue streams, Vince had been promising shareholders that a new television-rights deal would at least double the fees commanded by Raw, SmackDown, and the female-wrestler-driven reality show Total Divas ("You can put me in a hammerlock if we don't," he said during one presentation in 2013). WWE compared its viability to that of NASCAR, which had just signed a ten-year, $8.2 billion deal with Fox and NBC.
On May 15, WWE announced that it had reached a new agreement with NBCUniversal: roughly $813 million over four years, with a total escalation of $105 million from 2015 to 2019—starting at $175 million in 2015 and going up from there. While the new deal represented an increase from the $115 million earned by Raw, SmackDown, and Total Divas in 2014, it wasn't the double that Vince had promised.
After the announcement, WWE's stock dropped a whopping 43 percent basically overnight (Vince himself lost a reported $357 million), and the company was forced to lay off seven percent of the workforce to save money. In a conference call, Vince admitted that the launch of WWE Network earlier that year "definitely had a negative impact" on its negotiations with cable networks. "That was part of a lighter number in terms of television rights. That's a fair thing to say."
The stock seemed to stabilize a bit in August of 2014, but has mostly fluctuated since.
I wonder what Bruce Prichard says about that 
