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Welcome to PWInsider.com's live, ongoing coverage of WWE's third quarter earnings 2021 conference call.
Michael Weiss welcomed everyone to the call.
Vince said they have solid financial results that were "pretty, pretty strong" and said that they are unlike any other media company due to the demand for live events and touring. They have raised their 2021 guidance due to the strong indications they have gotten thus far. He noted there would only be one event in Saudi Arabia this year due to COVID-19 where they usually have two.
Nick Khan thanked everyone for calling in. He wanted to offer perspective on the media segment. They have two negotiations in their sights. Raw's rights on Hulu is coming to an end towards the end of 2022. There is a standard, recurring audience that watched the show. NBC was an active owner in Hulu in 2018 and Peacock didn't exist at the time. He noted that Disney has taken a great ownership. "The battle for Raw's rights will be intense and fun."
Khan then talked about the international rights for the WWE Network and pushed it as a big deal for the future.
They are continuing to expand their original programming slate. Miz & Mrs. will have a third season. They launched Escape the Undertaker on Network. They recently finished an thus far unrevealed children's animated series for a streaming service and will be adding a number of new scripted and unscripted projects in the future.
They are as bullish on their TV rights coming up as they were for the last set of deals, which brought the company massive new earnings. They are getting interest from new buyers as deals move closer to expiring.
The Netflix Vince McMahon docuseries early cuts are "out of this word, wait until you see it", according to Khan.
Nick Khan broke down recent live event and sports programming rights sales.
Khan said that as they work on extracting more value from WWE's intellectual property, they have had an active quarter creating new streams and enhance others.
They have spent a lot of time working on how to tweak PPV events. They are hosting four PPVs in Stadiums in the United States in 2022. He referred to Money in the Bank as of the company's "big five" PPVs.
They are going to Nashville for Summerslam as it's a busy, robust city on weekends in the summer. There was not one ticket sold for Summerslam in Vegas from the State of TN this year.
They moved the Royal Rumble to not compete with the Winter Olympics, which is being broadcast by their partner, NBC Universal.
They are running 1/1/22 in Atlanta as there's no NFL competition that weekend with so many thousands in town for New Year's weekend. They will be doing more Atlanta integration similar to Trae Young on Smackdown this past September leading into the Atlanta PPV show.
Khan touted the Panini trading card deal and a new multi-year deal with FOX on NFTs and similar merchandise.
Khan touted the company's new deal with Bill Simmons and Spotifiy.
Stephanie McMahon praised The Miz's run on Dancing with the Stars for the attention and eyeballs he brought to WWE. She stated they were changing touring from Arenas to Stadiums for PPVs. Summerslam was the most seen event in WWE history.
She praised the "Summer of Cena" marketing plan to help bring audiences back to the arena and with his exit, they ushered in new storylines with Brock Lesnar and Becky Lynch.
They have pivoted to multi-year, seven year deals with advertising partners and have seen growth. She talked about the integration of brands and film into their programming, such as the zombies on the PPV earlier this year and their partnership with Old Spice.
Stephanie compared WWE to the Marvel Cinematic Universe with each hero as their own franchise and that they are just starting to unlock their own talents as their own franchises, using Xavier Woods' YouTube channel and Becky Lynch on cereal boxes as examples.
Digital consumption was up and they have a renewed emphasis to create more content for different platforms. They are the number one sports brand on TikTok.
She pushed the March 2022 launch of the WWE 2K22 video game.
WWE CFO Kristina Salen began to discuss the company's financials, as released in the earnings call earlier this afternoon.
They went to the Q&A portion of the call.
They were asked about the rights to Raw on streaming and the international WWE Network and when they would like to have those deals locked in. The Raw deals will be locked up by the latter end of 2022. The process of the negotiations for the Network "should be in short order" now that travel has opened up again.
They were asked if the profitability of WWE Studios projects being up. Nick Kahn said they have a total flip of the model from years ago. Instead of creating new films that are self-financed, they license to other studios, which means no expense for them and a profit for them. They have some closed deals they haven't yet announced and they expect things to work out OK for them.
They were asked about social media had been hurt by the recent iOS upgrade. The company was not effected and there's been no negative effect to their advertising revenue.
They were asked about the role of the Metaverse and the digital online world. They expect that world will become robust and will be here to stay so they will pursue revenue there.
They were asked about the rate of turnover for mid to upper level management and was asked what the organizational goals were. Nick said they want more efficiency and are working on placing people in the right place.
They were asked about WWE NXT 2.0. Nick said they wanted a younger, fresher in-ring approach to the brand and believes they have found it. He stated some of the NXT talents have landed on the main roster and others will follow. NXT will continue in its current direction.
They were asked to gauge the size of sponsorships for the company going forward in future years. Stephanie said that there's no reason why they couldn't be making hundreds of millions from sponsorships in the next 3-5 years through talent, digital, social and international partnerships.
There are constant conversations about what WWE content to maintain on the WWE Network or to license outside of it. As PWInsider.com has written before, there's been a lot of talk about licensing the original documentary material outside of the Network after the success of A&E Biography and WWE's Most Wanted Treasures.
Kristina said live events will still be live events but they will have fewer PPVs reflected in the fourth quarter due to the December PPV shifting to 1/1/22. The first quarter of 2022 will have potentially three PPVs in that first quarter. Live events will fall in line with that touring. The demand for the live events seems to be on par with 2019 in terms of ticket sales and profitability.
The frequency of stadium PPVs will have no bearing on Raw, Smackdown and touring. They want to attract more fans and believe they want to attend the big shows in the right cities on the right nights.
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