Thought Of The Day – PPV Buys
This is another thing that crops up a lot that people don’t seem to get the common sense aspect of. People want less PPVs and to go to eight PPVs a year or something like that. People like these make me laugh. Here’s why.
The lowest amount of PPV buys in modern WWE history is December to Dismember with 90,000. At $40 a buy, that’s $360,000. Let’s go WAY low and say WWE gets 25% of that. That’s $90,000 for three hours. That’s not including ticket sales, merchandise sales for that night, any cut WWE might get of concessions and/or parking from the arena. Keeping in mind that’s by far the lowest amount of buys in WWE history, here’s my question.
Why in the world would WWE want to cut out HUGE paydays like that? What are they going to do to replace that money? PPV is the biggest money maker they’ve got, especially when you throw in any sponsorships they get to bring in even more money. How often do you hear of someone wanting to sponsor a Sunday night house show? Now how many times do you hear of someone sponsoring say Summerslam?
Getting rid of PPVs might help the product somewhat, but there is simply no way that cutting out multiple PPVs is going to make the company more money, period.
And then WWE threw the whole model out the window.
I agree with you, but I think many people who say they should reduce the number of PPV’s assume fans can’t afford the $480 for PPVs a year, whereas they may be able to afford slightly less, say $320 – thus giving the remaining PPV’s more buys. It’s a big assumption to make and not one the WWE will pick up any time soon, I’m sure.
Another thing to think of, however, is that the WWE has MANY costs in putting together a PPV, and I doubt $90,000, or even 90,000 buys makes them very much money at all when you take into account wages, advertisements, travel and hotel arrangements etc. If that number were a regular occurance, the WWE would be in A LOT of trouble.
Well yeah but that’s why I went with the lowest ever. Mania last year did over a million buys at $55 each, or 55 million dollars for one night. That’s not counting over six and a half million dollars in ticket sales plus a fortune in merchandise.
As for the families not being able to afford all 12 PPVs a year, that’s true. However think of it like this.
Let’s say there are 12 households and 12 PPVs a year. You said $320 for most of them is abotu what they can afford, so 12 x $320 = $3840. If all of the families had bought all of the PPVs, it would have been $5760, or 33% less profit.
The idea is simple: if you lower the amount of PPVs, you’re lowering the amount of potential profit that could be made. With 12 PPVs a year, there’s a chance that someone would buy them. Even if the shows did the $90,000 a pop like December to Dismember did, that’s still $90,000 that you won’t get elsewhere. That’s the big issue: the upgrade in quality by shifting to 8 PPVs a year isn’t going to drive up enough money to make up for four PPVs missing.
Good points KB, but the argument against 12-13 PPV’s a year is that it waters down the product, rendering it unable to build efficient storylines and “big time” atmosphere behind matches, not that it produces less money for the company.
Some people blindly say “LESS PAY PER VIEWS!”, but all it proves is that to WWE, Money > Proper product building. At the end of the day though, it is a business, and profit is what matters. 60 Minute Hornswoggle-Chavo Guerrero Ironman matches drawing profit? They’ll headline every PPV.