Want more wrestling news, rumors, and results? Be sure to visit PWInsider.com and PWInsiderXtra.com.
If you were to time travel back to the Attitude Era and tell a wrestling fan that the future of the industry wouldn't be decided by cable ratings, pay-per-view buyrates, or even network executives, but rather by algorithms and global subscriber counts, they would have looked at you like you had just spoken a foreign language. Yet, as we close the book on 2025, that is exactly the reality we find ourselves in.
This was the year the "Monday Night Wars" officially became the "Streaming Wars." It was the year the industry finally cut the cord—metaphorically and literally—and dived headfirst into the digital deep end.
For decades, the health of professional wrestling was measured by a single, archaic metric: the Nielsen rating. We obsessed over 2.5s and 3.0s. We argued over quarter-hour breakdowns and 18-49 demographics. But looking back at the last twelve months, those arguments feel like relics of a bygone era. With WWE’s historic move to Netflix and AEW’s integration into Max, the game has fundamentally changed. The scoreboard has been taken down, and the rules have been rewritten.
The Netflix Experiment: One Year In
When Monday Night Raw debuted on Netflix back in January, the skepticism was palpable. There were legitimate fears about stream stability, production value, and whether the casual fan would follow the product behind a paywall. Twelve months later, those fears seem almost laughable.
The "Netflix Era" has liberated WWE’s production in ways we didn't fully anticipate. Free from the rigid constraints of traditional cable ad breaks, the flow of the show has transformed. We no longer see matches awkwardly stopped for a "commercial break" while the action continues in a picture-in-picture window. The pacing is tighter, the storytelling is more fluid, and the global accessibility has been a game-changer.
For the first time in history, a fan in London, a fan in Sao Paulo, and a fan in Chicago are watching the same feed, at the same time, on the same platform. The "fragmentation" of international rights—where the UK was on a delay, or Canada had a different feed—is gone. This unification has created a truly global conversation on social media every Monday night that linear TV simply couldn't replicate.
However, it hasn't been without its growing pains. The "binge-watch" culture of Netflix subscribers doesn't always translate perfectly to episodic live sports. There was a learning curve in the first quarter of the year as the company figured out how to retain viewers who are used to having an entire season of Stranger Things dropped at once. But Triple H and Nick Khan have adapted. The storytelling has become more serialized, rewarding the long-term viewer rather than just popping a rating for one night.
AEW and the "Max" Factor
On the other side of the aisle, All Elite Wrestling has quietly found its footing in the Warner Bros. Discovery ecosystem. The doom-and-gloom predictions of 2024 regarding AEW’s media rights renewal proved to be unfounded. The deal secured in late 2024 has given Tony Khan the one thing his company desperately needed: stability.
The simulcasting of Dynamite and Collision on Max starting this past January has been a lifeline for the brand. While linear cable numbers on TBS and TNT have continued their slow, inevitable decline (a trend affecting all of television, not just wrestling), the internal streaming numbers on Max have reportedly been strong.
This shift has forced wrestling journalists and fans alike to rethink how we define "success." We can no longer point to a sub-700k number on a Wednesday night and declare the company is "dying" when we don't see the digital viewership. It has made the "ratings war" discourse murkier, but perhaps that is a healthy development. Without the weekly public scorecard, the focus has arguably shifted back to the product itself—the match quality, the feuds, and the characters.
The High Stakes of the New Economy
The financial implications of these moves cannot be overstated. We are witnessing an era of spending that makes the Monday Night Wars look like a disagreement over pocket change. The rights fees commanding these deals are astronomical, and they bring with them a new kind of pressure.
In many ways, the modern wrestling promoter has become less like a carnival barker and more like a high-stakes gambler standing in the middle of a crowded casino floor. You look at the table, and the buy-in is no longer just renting an arena and printing some flyers. The buy-in is billions of dollars in infrastructure and content libraries. That’s how online casinos work. By hosting thousands of games on a single website, online casinos take advantage of streaming in a way that physical casinos can’t keep up with. Such is the explosion of online casinos since that happened that Sister Site and other comparison sites are scrambling to keep up, adding multiple new casino reviews every day and still having to push hard just to stay current.
WWE has effectively gone "all in" on the streaming model, pushing all their chips into the center of the table on the belief that linear TV is a sinking ship. It is a calculated risk, but a risk nonetheless. If the subscriber growth stalls, or if the algorithm decides wrestling isn't "sticky" enough, the house always wins. Meanwhile, AEW is playing a slightly different game, hedging their bets by keeping a foot in both the cable world and the streaming world. It’s a strategy of diversification—placing smaller bets on multiple numbers rather than putting everything on Red.
This "casino mentality" extends to the talent roster as well. With two massive corporate entities backing the two major companies, the bidding wars for free agents in 2025 have been fierce. We have seen salaries balloon to levels that would make the founders of this industry weep. But unlike the reckless spending of WCW in the late 90s, this spending is backed by guaranteed rights fees. The money is real, but the expectation for return on investment is higher than ever.
The Death of the "Casual" Fan?
One concern that lingers as we look ahead to 2026 is the barrier to entry. In the cable era, a bored viewer could stumble upon wrestling while flipping channels. That "accidental discovery" was the lifeblood of new fan acquisition for decades.
In the streaming era, there is no "channel flipping." You have to actively choose to click on the WWE or AEW tile. The algorithm might recommend it, but you still have to make a conscious decision to engage. Are we creating a closed loop? Are we servicing the hardcore fanbase perfectly while making it harder for the casual viewer to find the product?
This is the challenge for the next twelve months. Both companies need to figure out how to break out of their algorithmic bubbles. We have seen efforts to cross-pollinate—WWE stars appearing on Netflix reality shows, AEW talent popping up in WBD movies—but the data on whether this converts to wrestling viewers is still inconclusive.
Looking to 2026
As we head toward the Royal Rumble and the beginning of the road to WrestleMania 42, the landscape is unrecognizable from where we were just five years ago. The "Monday Night War" is over, replaced by a battle for attention in an infinite sea of content.
The winner of this new war won't be decided by who has the highest rating on a Tuesday morning fax from Nielsen. It will be decided by who can remain relevant in a world where Squid Game, the NFL, and a random TikTok trend are all fighting for the same eyeballs on the same screen.
The cable era is dead. Long live the stream.
If you enjoy PWInsider.com you can check out the AD-FREE PWInsider Elite section, which features exclusive audio updates, news, our critically acclaimed podcasts, interviews and more by clicking here!
Bang On Casino
