WWE Raw: New Deal With NBCUniversal Shifts Revenue Source, Potentially Changing Pay Per Views

For years, WWE Raw and other weekly programming has served to build towards pay per view events, the big money makers. But a possible new rights deal for the flagship show changes all that.

Late last week, news broke about an impending new rights deal for WWE Raw. The Hollywood Reporter states that NBCUniversal (which is the parent company for USA Network, WWE’s current broadcast home) was closing in on a deal worth three times that of the current rights contract. The NBCU deal is only for Raw, leaving SmackDown Live up for open bidding, but the amount of revenue generated by WWE‘s flagship show would be staggeringly high.

With such a large amount of money coming in from a weekly television show, where will that leave pay per view events? After the launch of the WWE Network in 2014, many of the pay per views outside of the Big 4 have been seen as nothing more than “Super Raw” or “Super SmackDown” — they aren’t seen as anything special. Nothing ever seems to really happen of note outside of WrestleMania, SummerSlam, Survivor Series, or Royal Rumble. And even that isn’t always the case.

Now, a report from Dave Meltzer on Wrestling Observer Radio indicates that the pay per view model may be seeing yet another change. Because of the rumored new television deal, WWE Raw will be more profitable than PPV events. Now, I’m no Wall Street guy, but I would think logic dictates a company’s biggest focus should be on the biggest moneymakers. If that’s now Raw, pay per views become less important than the weekly shows. That’s weird!

Obviously, the Big 4 will likely continue to be viewed as such. But in an era where, say, Backlash brings in much less money than a random episode of Raw, do you think WWE is going to go out of their way to make Backlash unforgettable? No — if the money is coming from Raw, that’s what you want your audience to be looking forward to.

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How will this change pay per views? Maybe they’ll begin to feature more inter-brand matches. Why give away a title change on Extreme Rules if your money comes from keeping people watching Raw? So why bother going through the charade of setting up a title match when you can just provide a match that isn’t possible on Raw? Instead of Seth Rollins defending the Intercontinental Championship against a guy like Jinder Mahal, maybe you could have Rollins from Raw facing AJ Styles from SmackDown.

The bigger question is whether or not pay per views may eventually become brand exclusive again. Now that would be a big mistake in my opinion, but if PPV isn’t the driving revenue factor, it’s the kind of thing WWE can get away with. If the company takes the money from WWE Raw and puts it into reviving the brand exclusive shows — and having more of them, like after the recent brand split — you have more one-offs that build up your stories for the weekly shows. It sounds completely illogical — but it’s WWE!

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Keep in mind, this is all speculation on my part. I have no stock in WWE (although I wouldn’t mind owning some after the record share prices lately), and nobody asks me for creative input. But reading the writing on the wall with this WWE Raw deal leads me to believe pay per views will look much different come 2019.