WWE’s Monday Night Raw has made a successful debut on Netflix, according to Co-CEO Ted Sarandos. During today’s Netflix earnings call, Sarandos shared impressive viewership numbers, highlighting the streaming platform’s reach and impact.
“WWE is off to a great start,” Sarandos stated. “Our 1st week, we drew about 5,000,000 views, which is about 2 times the audience that Monday Night Raw was getting a linear television, pretty consistent with how we modeled it, how we’d hoped to build the audience for the league.”
This marks a significant increase in viewership compared to the show’s previous linear television performance. Sarandos also pointed out the growth in non-live viewing: “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.” This indicates Netflix is expanding Raw’s global reach, particularly in key international markets.
The success isn’t limited to international viewers. Sarandos confirmed strong performance within the US as well, saying, “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.”
Sarandos emphasized the importance of financial viability. “Again, just not to be overly repetitive, but we are not 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.” This statement underscores Netflix’s commitment to ensuring sustainable financial models for sports content.
On their earnings call today, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos expressed that they are very happy with WWE.
One of the things touted was the non-live viewing numbers. "We also saw that the non live viewing, so in the day after the live event, our viewing grew by 25%, mostly outside of… pic.twitter.com/khfnkvnbvx
— Wrestling News (@WrestlingNewsCo) January 22, 2025
