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Michael Weiss welcomed everyone to to the call and noted George Barrios and Michelle Wilson would be joining them. No Vince McMahon.
George took over the call and said they wanted to give an update on the growth of WWE Network. Barrios said that Wrestlemania was a huge success. Mania was a big driver of subscribers and said that WWE Network now had "nearly" two million subscribers. They pushed that it was an all-time high for Wrestlemania viewership. He said a press release was being released later but was not available now due to a technical issue.
Subs are up 11% domestically from this quarter last year.
Michelle Wilson talked about how the company is "super-serving" their audience with content like 205 Live and the WWE UK championship tournament as well as new seasons of The Edge and Christian Show and Storytime. She pushed that they are doing 32 Woman tournament this summer. They are pleased by the ongoing growth of the Network.
They began taking questions.
They were asked about whether they had an uplift in international subscribers for Wrestlemania season. They were up 23% up for international.
They were asked about the promotions the Network ran leading into Mania and which provided the best lift. They said the free month provides the biggest boost but as they get better data and analytics, they are able to target different portions of their base and did the three months for $9.99 to a small, specific audience.
They were asked for the hard numbers:
The actual subscriber count was 1,949,000 total subscribers. Of that, 1,661,000 were paid customers.
Domestically, they have 1,452,000 total subscribers, 1,237,000 of which were paid.
Internationally, they have 497,000 subscribers, of which 424,000 were paid.
They chose to not distinguish how many of the current free users were on a three month deal vs. a one month deal.
They were asked if they have gotten feedback in terms of the quality of Wrestlemania 33 and how that plays into how subscribers are retained. They had over 130 million social media views, over double from last year. Wrestlemania had 18 million social media fan engagements, also up from last year.
They were asked about the reception for Wrestlemania being available live in China for the first time on PPV. The Network is not available there and they feel going alone in China would be difficult. They have been working with their partner PPTV and Mania was hosted on PPV in partnership there. He noted it's a hard market and even Netflix has opted not to go direct to consumer there.
They were asked about PPV buy numbers for Wrestlemania 33 through the pre-Network means. They don't get that data for awhile.
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