Very Interesting Numbers On WWE’s Online Audience

There’s an audience out there. One of the things that WWE has done very well at over the years is establishing all kinds of ways to watch their product. It could be on regular television, online, on social media apps or somewhere in between, but you are almost never out of options for a way to see WWE material. It turns out that they are doing rather well in one aspect.

Over the last few years, if not even more, it has become clear that WWE television does not have the same kind of audience that they had in years past. The audiences from the late 1990s absolutely obliterate what WWE is doing these days, but the company continues to sign huge deals for their content. The fans have to be coming from somewhere though and now we have a better idea where that might be.

Brandon Thurston of Wrestlenomics has tweeted out the results of a study of WWE’s online engagement. From February – December 2020, WWE had 8.3m unique views across multiple social media platforms, putting it above ESPN (6.3m), SportsCenter (6.3m), ABC News (5.7m) and more among US males 13-34, ranking third overall. However, they did not rank in the top ten among US females 13-34. Among US males 25-44, WWE drew 13.7m unique views (#5 overall), compared to 18.2 for ESPN and 20.7m for SportsCenter. They again did not rank in the top ten for US females 25-44.

Among males 13-24, WWE had more unique viewers (8.3M) in the U.S. on YouTube and Facebook than SportsCenter (6.3M) or ESPN (6.3M), from Feb-Dec 2020, according to Tubular Labs. pic.twitter.com/CqPzRUgSgi

— Brandon Thurston (@BrandonThurston) February 28, 2021

Among U.S. males 25-44, SportsCenter (20.7M) and ESPN (18.2M) lead WWE (13.7M). pic.twitter.com/YJ4SkSRUiK

— Brandon Thurston (@BrandonThurston) February 28, 2021

These numbers are insightful because they refer to U.S. unique viewers.

Public view counts are global and likely from emerging economies where CPMs are still low. Furthermore, this is a count of unique monthly viewers, as opposed to a count of views from redundant viewers.

— Brandon Thurston (@BrandonThurston) February 28, 2021

Those are quite the views. Check out what they were watching the most all time from WWE’s YouTube:

Randy Orton makes it personal with Triple H

John Cena and Brock Lesnar get into a brawl that clears the entire locker room: Raw, April 9, 2012

Stunning in-ring proposals: WWE Top 10, Nov. 27, 2017

Opinion: This is interesting as it shows that there is indeed a large WWE audience out there, but at the same time they are not watching the television shows. That makes a lot of sense, as the amount of people watching anything for that long is going down. Yes the Monday Night Raw audience is shrinking, but how many people are going to sit there for three hours a week? This is good news for WWE, but they still have a lot of problems to fix.

Thomas Hall has been a wrestling fan for over thirty years and has seen over 50,000 wrestling matches. He has also been a wrestling reviewer since 2009 with over 5,000 full shows covered. You can find his work at kbwrestlingreviews.com, or check out his- Amazon author page with 30 wrestling books.

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