WWE Co-President, George Barrios, answered a variety of questions during the WWE earnings call on Thursday. A few of these questions had to do with AEW.
During the call, Barrios was asked if there has been any impact on WWE from the recent competition of AEW:
Here is what he said:
“The live content ecosystem is competitive. So whether you’re talking about the NFL, which kind of stands alone on that next tier of us, the NBA, [Major League] Baseball, NASCAR, and then you start kind of moving down and you get to the third or fourth tier. So everybody is a competitor to some degree. Ultimately, what we try to do is drive as much engagement as we can on Monday and Friday nights, and we feel pretty good on our history in doing that. And then our ability to continue doing that in the future.
“So they’re a competitor, like there’s a lot of competition for eyeballs, and we take them seriously. And our expectation is that we win.”
Barrios was also asked if the cost of talent has risen due to the competition from AEW. Here is what he said:
“And so just to clarify, what I said was that producing our core in-ring content, has three elements of cost. It’s the creative side, we talked a little bit about the new model we put in place there. It’s the talent, which is attracting, developing and retaining the talent, and third one is the actual production element. And we said that in all three cases, on a year-over-year basis, they’re higher – the costs are higher. So it’s us making investments into what we think is the most important thing that we do. Don’t want to really get into kind of external perspective on that and what may influence it. The only other thing I would say is that historically, as the company [WWE] has done better, our talent has done better. And we think that’s part of the win-win kind of virtuous cycle, and we think that’s a good model, and it’s one that we can – we’ve always expected to continue employing.
“As far as individual talent making choices, everyone’s got a decision to make. I will say, we have a sizable wrestling platform by an order of magnitude, maybe two orders magnitude of anyone in the world. The amount of consumption we do in the United States, across the world on traditional pay TV, the 35 billion video views that we do, the over 1 billion social media accounts that we have, being the large – second largest SVOD sports service in the world. So I would imagine, I’m not a talent myself. But I would imagine, as people are thinking about who to align with, that all those things are really, really important. We certainly think so.”
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