This article has been updated to reflect Variety’s update to its report, changing its report of the average annual value of the new deal from $150 million to $185 million.
AEW’s new media rights deal with Warner Bros. Discovery evidently values Dynamite and Collision much closer to the value per viewer hour of WWE Monday Night Raw than of WWE’s developmental TV show, NXT.
The analysis above is one way to assess the rate of value based on viewership and annual hours of content, divided by the average annual value of the media deal.
You can think of the two columns on the far right in the table above (where the cells are highlighted in yellow) as the payment the TV network is giving the wrestling company for each hour that a viewer watches the television program.
We’re doing the math here based on the trailing 365 days of viewership and program run time for each program: NXT, Raw, Dynamite, and Collision.
In an article last month I wrote that to get the $170 million average annual value that was being reported by Puck, we would need to apply Raw’s rate of payment per viewer hour, which may seem generous given the greater viewership of Raw compared to AEW’s top program, Dynamite. But actually that seems to have been quite close to the case after all.
Why use $178 million here for AEW’s new deal when some outlets are reporting the average annual value is $185 million?
I used $178 million here because it is simply the median of $170 million, as reported by Sports Business Journal, and $185 million, reported by Variety and others.
If you love online discussion about media rights fees, TV ratings, and the contrast between WWE and AEW, you can look forward to this being an issue of contention for the next four years unless one of the parties to the deal clarifies the value.
I believe some portion of the $15 million difference between $185 million AAV and the originally reported $170 million is not cash, possibly having to do with WBD’s minority equity stake in AEW and/or other in-kind values WBD will give to AEW throughout the term of the deal. Equity by its nature — like stock in any company — has speculative value; the share prices in public companies, for example, change by the minute. So various reports might be taking for granted different values in the equity of AEW.
The AAV for Raw is our estimate based on WWE’s announcement of its deal with Netflix that includes broad international global rights to WWE content. The AAV for NXT is based on our report on the value of NXT’s new deal with CW.
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Brandon Thurston has written about wrestling business since 2015. He operates and owns Wrestlenomics.