Jump to content
DVDVR Message Board

Vince McMahon Returns to WWE


Recommended Posts

Comcast would be such a fitting owner - they’re also a founding-family-controlled business where the CEO has an outsized portion of voting rights via Class B shares!

Edited by Hamhock
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Meltzer:

Quote

Through the McMahon family corporate tumult that has dominated headlines, WWE CEO Nick Khan has been the buffer between the various parties trying to smooth things over.

Dave Meltzer reported as such in this week's Wrestling Observer Newsletter.

In reviewing the circumstances in which Stephanie McMahon suddenly resigned as co-CEO and left the company completely this week, Meltzer wrote, "It was also conceded that she and Vince (McMahon) did have issues in working together as family members and how Khan was a buffer who kept things smooth between them as well as between Vince and (Paul) Levesque.“

In a whirlwind of moves, Vince McMahon returned to the company from his July resignation last Friday after six months away and was officially reinstated as Executive Chairman of the Board on Tuesday. Hours earlier, Stephanie had resigned as co-CEO and Khan was granted the full role. She had also served the role as Chairwoman since her father resigned.

At the time Stephanie McMahon had taken a leave of absence to spend more time with family prior to her father's scandal, a Business Insider piece painted her in a negative light and reported that her father had replaced her. Meltzer reported afterward that wasn't the case and that she had left on her own accord.

Khan remains as CEO as the company is pursuing a sale this year while Levesque, Stephanie's husband, is also still in his role of heading up creative as chief content officer.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Infinit said:

....about that next TV contract. Not sure if it's going to be as lucrative as the last one. 

Isn't this true of most sports/sports-adjacent deals, though?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, The Natural said:

Get well soon, Stephanie McMahon.

The best thing that comes out of any of this is the Stephanie McMahon and HHH get away from the business and just turn into to regular happy rich assholes on social media who post occasionally funny mostly narcissistic bullshit but aren't actively fucking people over on the daily and I can kind of like them again.

  • Like 4
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, piranesi said:

The best thing that comes out of any of this is the Stephanie McMahon and HHH get away from the business and just turn into to regular happy rich assholes on social media who post occasionally funny mostly narcissistic bullshit but aren't actively fucking people over on the daily and I can kind of like them again.

Or a reality show where they have to live and vacation around the world with Cm PUnk and AJ Lee.

  • Haha 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 minutes ago, SirSmellingtonofCascadia said:

Isn't this true of most sports/sports-adjacent deals, though?

No.  Pretty much every sports broadcast deal makes money for the network according to John Skipper who used to run ESPN.  If you look at TV ratings, sports tend to get high ratings and advertisers pay high rates.  Wrestling gets high ratings, but advertisers are not willing to pay nearly as much to advertise during wrestling shows.  Understand, networks put on shows to sell advertising.  Every dime they pay for programming is spent hoping to get a significant return on that investment.  Plenty of profitable shows get cancelled, so it's a pretty bad sign if a network is losing over $100 million a year on a broadcast rights deal.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

15 minutes ago, supremebve said:

No.  Pretty much every sports broadcast deal makes money for the network according to John Skipper who used to run ESPN.  If you look at TV ratings, sports tend to get high ratings and advertisers pay high rates.  Wrestling gets high ratings, but advertisers are not willing to pay nearly as much to advertise during wrestling shows.  Understand, networks put on shows to sell advertising.  Every dime they pay for programming is spent hoping to get a significant return on that investment.  Plenty of profitable shows get cancelled, so it's a pretty bad sign if a network is losing over $100 million a year on a broadcast rights deal.

To that point, pre ESPN era UFC (so at least four or five years ago) use to get paid for their ads on Fox more than WWE would at the time and that's crazy considering WWE's ratings at the time use far exceeded the UFC. That said, back then, the UFC was only running about 4 or 5 shows on Fox and roughly between 20-30 shows on FS1/FX a year. However, you would think a product that's far more violent and graphic than WWE would not be doing anywhere in the same ballpark. 

I did see this story on Boxing Scene this morning that I thought was interesting. These particular parts caught my attention:

Quote

Upstart sports streaming service DAZN sustained an operating loss of $1.36 billion for 2021 and an overall loss of $2.3 billion, according to a report published by Bloomberg on Wednesday.

DAZN CEO Shay Segev told Bloomberg the chief reason was due to its $1.9 billion commitment to acquire Italian and German soccer rights around Bundesliga and Serie A. 

Bloomberg indicated that the figures they reported were accounts shared with the media company by DAZN.

 

Quote

Matchroom signed an eight-year, $1 billion deal with DAZN in May 2018.

In October 2018, DAZN signed Canelo Alvarez to a 10-fight, $350 million deal, but after three fights into his contract in 2020, Alvarez became a free agent when he was released from his Golden Boy and DAZN contracts.

Alvarez has since still fought five out of his last six fights on DAZN, totalling eight overall. 

Alvarez’s last two fights against Dmitry Bivol in May and Gennadiy Golovkin in September took place on DAZN pay-per-view, a new venture for DAZN that was designed to cover costs associated around licensing boxing events with the goal to generate more revenue in addition to their monthly subscription model. 

The move came after DAZN had declared in advertising campaigns that the PPV model would no longer be relevant in boxing.

Even more intriguing is there is another story on BoxingScene today with the DAZN EVP saying he's hoping these Youtuber fights (there is one this weekend with KSI) can be a powerful contribution to their business.

What do the kids like to say in the streets nowadays....the math ain't mathing? Well, something seems kinda strange here. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

21 minutes ago, supremebve said:

No.  Pretty much every sports broadcast deal makes money for the network according to John Skipper who used to run ESPN.  If you look at TV ratings, sports tend to get high ratings and advertisers pay high rates.  Wrestling gets high ratings, but advertisers are not willing to pay nearly as much to advertise during wrestling shows.  Understand, networks put on shows to sell advertising.  Every dime they pay for programming is spent hoping to get a significant return on that investment.  Plenty of profitable shows get cancelled, so it's a pretty bad sign if a network is losing over $100 million a year on a broadcast rights deal.

Do you know the best place to look up this info? Not saying I don't believe you, but I was under the impression that no sports contract paid for itself directly through ad revenue, at least in the U.S.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So if I'm a TV network, why wouldn't I want to encourage/assist the Khan's to buy WWE in exchange for a favourable deal on the broadcast deal instead? 

I mean, yeah, that could apply to any non TV network bidding, but as we saw with Fusion in 2001, if there's no tv deal attached, the deal is worthless.  Wouldn't the play here be around making it less of a loss leader rather than competing with stupid money bids?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 minutes ago, SirSmellingtonofCascadia said:

Do you know the best place to look up this info? Not saying I don't believe you, but I was under the impression that no sports contract paid for itself directly through ad revenue, at least in the U.S.

You'll have to scroll through a bunch of episodes, but John Skipper has talked about it multiple times on LeBatard's podcast.  I'd advise to look up Thursday local hours, because that's when David Sampson is on, and they tend to include him when they talk about the business side of sports.  I know they talked about it whenever the MLS rights deal was in the news and whenever the last college football conference did their TV deal.  Skipper's overall point was that everybody scoffs at the price networks pay for broadcast rights, but they always payoff in the end.  I don't know how the profit breaks down, but I don't see how they could possibly keep spending like this if they aren't making money.  Sports are one of the few things people consistently watch live, and if you're selling advertising that has to be extremely valuable.  I guess if it drives viewers to your cheaper programming, that would be worth it, but why not just charge more for advertising if that's the one thing people watch without fast forwarding throught the ads?

  • Like 1
  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, zendragon said:

I know networks loose money on football as a loss leader to attract advertisers to the network and promote fall lineups. Not sure if the same logic follows for wrestling

Arguably, that's what made Fox into a "legit" network. 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, supremebve said:

You'll have to scroll through a bunch of episodes, but John Skipper has talked about it multiple times on LeBatard's podcast.  I'd advise to look up Thursday local hours, because that's when David Sampson is on, and they tend to include him when they talk about the business side of sports.  I know they talked about it whenever the MLS rights deal was in the news and whenever the last college football conference did their TV deal.  Skipper's overall point was that everybody scoffs at the price networks pay for broadcast rights, but they always payoff in the end.  I don't know how the profit breaks down, but I don't see how they could possibly keep spending like this if they aren't making money.  Sports are one of the few things people consistently watch live, and if you're selling advertising that has to be extremely valuable.  I guess if it drives viewers to your cheaper programming, that would be worth it, but why not just charge more for advertising if that's the one thing people watch without fast forwarding throught the ads?

 

1 hour ago, zendragon said:

I know networks loose money on football as a loss leader to attract advertisers to the network and promote fall lineups. Not sure if the same logic follows for wrestling

Thanks. I was certain that I'd read that the NFL was a loss leader and that most big deals were; they are used to get your mainline shows some press (or to pull streaming subs for at the very least a quarterly boost, a la NBC putting a lot of the Olympic Games on Peacock). 

Probably the answer is complex, so I appreciate supremebve for offering a starting point to learn more. 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, nofuture said:

 

Listened to this again, and to distill it, these facts are already baked into Morgan Stanley's prediction that WWE will get AT LEAST a 1.35x increase in their rights, more likely 1.5x or more. So Meltzer dropped the ball on this one.

  • Like 3
  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...