Jerry Lawler was at an appearance this past weekend at a Superman convention in Metropolis, IL, and he reportedly said that WWE would be increasing to 20 PPVs per year. According to reports from Prowrestling.net, Lawler said that starting in September there would be two PPVs each month, one Raw show and one Smackdown show, except in four months which WWE would present one major joint show. Three of those months would almost certainly be the months of Royal Rumble, WrestleMania and SummerSlam. It’s not certain which would be the fourth month as Survivor Series used to be big four because of its tenure, but really Elimination Chamber and Money in the Bank both surpassed it years ago.
At this point, no WWE sources have confirmed (or for that matter denied) the story but Lawler, as a Smackdown announcer would likely be among the first to be told because he books himself regularly on weekends. The last thing they need when they are losing audience because of too much product on TV, with TV as their main revenue source, is to add key product that they aren’t getting paid extra for. It’s not as bad as it could be, because almost nobody is buying PPVs. It’ll end up making the big shows the equivalent to UFC shows on FS 1, where even the hardcore fan base skips a lot the shows and only focuses on the big ones.
It also waters down the concept of “big show” as instead of a monthly big show, you have four a year. It is of more value to the network, but adding more weaker shows as opposed to stronger shows probably isn’t the answer at this point. The flip side of the argument is from a network standpoint, the network pretty much lives and dies based on live content and this adds one live show per month. It will likely continue the erosion of the audience.
It is true that wrestling thrived with far more than that in the late '90s, but it was a hotter product at the time, and the shows were from different companies. The one way this may work is if Raw and Smackdown have completely different fingerprints and ring and show styles. They can both be WWE, but if they are different, like Raw is different from NXT, it could work. It would probably hurt ROH, which is the next leading player in the PPV game.
If you’re talking eight hours of wrestling, two weekends a month between Sunday and Tuesday, unless you don’t do major angles during a lot of those hours and teach people to skip some of those hours, you’re making it so you’ll have this strong fan base being catered to because it’s their life. It’s also going to drive away people who already can’t keep up with the product, which has already happened. It will be interesting if this is used for a network price increase, because that is the one way this does make sense. The network price is almost surely lower than they can charge for maximum revenue, but when they started they wanted to be near the Netflix price point because Netflix pretty much established the price point.
If you figure $2 million as the cost of a PPV (and you can definitely cut costs and do them more cheaply, especially if you cut back on the talent payoffs) and you are adding eight new ones, that’s $16 million per year. Since WWE makes about $8.50 per month out of the $9.99 in gross revenue, and there are other costs involved so $8 may be a better number to use, you need 2 million month orders, or 167,000 new orders that stay there every month to justify the increase in price. However, if you raise the price $3 per month, and have 1.5 million subscribers, that’s an additional $54 million annually in network revenue which more than makes up for the added cost. Even raising the price $1 per month across the board would largely cover the added costs. You may lose some subscribers with a price increase, but if it’s pushed you’re getting twice as many big shows, and the big shows are the major network driver, I don’t know that the loss will be significant if any.