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TKO’s third quarter earnings call was held last week, two months after WWE began its five-year media rights deal with ESPN with Wrestlepalooza. The show featured John Cena and Brock Lesnar, as well as the in-ring return of AJ Lee, and was streamed on ESPN’s new direct-to-consumer platform. During the call, WWE President Nick Khan praised ESPN’s coverage of Wrestlepalooza on shows like College Game Day, but he did add one caveat to the coverage.
“It’s going to take time for ESPN to grow that platform the way that they want to grow it. We’re patient. We’ll continue to put on our product the way that we think only we can do.”
TKO COO Mark Shapiro added: “We want to sustain that. We need to sustain that. And I think at the same time, it’s extremely important to us. And we’re watching like everybody else to see that as they renew a lot of their, distribution partner deals, that they get the ability to authenticate for free. So, you know, ESPN DTC, if you’re, so-and-so subscriber, you know, I’m not going to get into, you know, who has it and who doesn’t. You know, some of these folks can just authenticate and they get the DTC partnership for free. They just carry the app and others are paying $29.99. And it’s their goal, of course, to redo all their transmission deals and get these consents. And we’re, you know, we’re anxious to see that happen.”
Shapiro likely is referring to ESPN’s carriage dispute with YouTube TV, which has caused millions to miss out on Monday Night Football, the NBA and college sports. As Shapiro noted, people can authenticate their cable subscription to get ESPN’s DTC product for free, which theoretically means they can easily watch a WWE premium live event.
A theoretical benefit of streaming Wrestlepalooza on ESPN was to increase the number of subscribers to its DTC product. Antenna estimated that there were 2.1 million sign-ups to ESPN’s streaming service from launch on Aug. 21 through Sept. 30. Those figures do not include existing Disney subscribers who switched from other plans or individuals who activated the service through a MVPD partnership. Antenna also estimated that 57% of ESPN subscribers opted for the new Unlimited service, which is needed to watch a WWE PLE. Antenna’s chart of weekly sign-ups showed a spike of sign-ups between 150,000 and 200,000 around Sept. 20, the date of Wrestlepalooza.
In comparison, the WWE Network plateaued at around 1.2 million domestic subscribers and peaked around two million globally, well short of WWE’s public goal of three million. Antenna estimated less than 200,000 daily sign-ups around Wrestlemania 41, which was on the same level as the Season 50 premiere of Saturday Night Live and Love Island USA season 7 premiere. The 2024 Paris Olympics, the Peacock exclusive NFL game in Brazil and a 2024 Black Friday promotion brought more sign-ups ranging between 400,000 and 600,000. Comcast quarterly filings showed that Peacock’s subscriber count only grew from 34 million in Q1 2024 to 41 million in Q3 2025,. Peacock exclusive NBA games did not happen during Q3 2025, so it’s unknown if that had an effect on the streaming service. Comcast’s quarterly filings also showed that Peacock’s losses narrowed to $217 million.
Whether he intended to or not, Khan’s comments called into question what TKO’s expectations are for ESPN for how it presents WWE on its platform. Khan’s comments were a week before ESPN and Penn Entertainment agreed to end their partnership and sunset ESPN Bet, which had trouble breaking through among ESPN viewers and the sports gambling community. It’s tough to gauge how much crossover there will be between ESPN viewers and pro wrestling fans, but it could be something TKO/WWE will keep in mind during their media rights agreement.
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Analysis: This time of year when major men’s team sports are in the offseason demonstrates the much-bragged-about “52 weeks-a-year” season for wrestling (or MMA) that provides value to networks year-round. With the NBA and NHL joining the NFL in the offseason, Smackdown ranked #2 in P18-49 across all of broadcast and cable primetime for the seven-day period below. If you combine the audiences of the UFC PPV prelim simulcast on ESPN and ESPNU on Saturday, June 28, that telecast’s P18-49 rating would be 0.45, just above Smackdown.
Brandon Thurston has written about wrestling business since 2015. He operates and owns Wrestlenomics.
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WrestleMania 2026 won’t happen in New Orleans, despite the announcement in February that it would. WWE ticket prices are up. Employee perks are down. Many on staff have been let go over the last 18 months. Others have had raises and benefits limited. There hasn’t been a single domestic house show in 2025 to date. Meanwhile, TKO stock is up 45% over the last year, easily outperforming the major indexes.
It’s tempting to file all this under familiar labels like corporate greed or the demands of Wall Street. But those categories don’t really explain what’s happening or why it’s happening now.
Full data report available for subscribers. This post includes a portion of our latest analysis. The complete version, with all tables, charts, plus breakdowns of attendance and YouTube is published ad-free for Wrestlenomics subscribers on Patreon and Substack.
This analysis of comments from Reddit’s most active wrestling community, r/SquaredCircle, provides two key insights.
WWE was the dominant topic on the subreddit in recent years, but AEW—despite WWE’s lead in television viewership and other more broad metrics—approached WWE in comment volume with this fan community in some months.
AEW-related comments were more positive than WWE’s for several years, but that sentiment advantage began declining in mid-2022 and disappeared by mid-2023.
We shouldn’t mistake r/SquaredCircle users for an ideal cross-section population that proportionately reflects the consumer wrestling market, but the user base is large and meaningful insights can be gathered from a study like this while bearing in mind that the community is evidently skewed toward highly-engaged fans.
The first chart below shows the monthly count of comments containing selected keywords assigned to either WWE or AEW. While WWE consistently generated more comments, AEW’s presence in the subreddit was substantial, with notable increases that coincided with major events or news stories.
It’s unsurprising that we find the highest monthly volume for comments related to WWE was in April 2019, the month of that year’s Wrestlemania. And the highest single month for AEW’s comment volume was August 2021, the month that CM Punk debuted in the company.
The second chart measures the compound sentiment of those comments, scored using VADER Sentiment Analysis (no relation to Leon White).
Between late 2019 and mid-2022, AEW-related comments were substantially more positive than WWE-related comments. But that gap began narrowing steadily in mid-2022, and disappeared entirely by mid-2023, based on a twelve-month moving average. The sentiment for both WWE and AEW on the subreddit remained remarkably close thereafter and AEW was closing the gap as 2024 ended.
While r/SquaredCircle users are probably disproportionately engaged wrestling fans, the trajectory of sentiment over time—rather than any individual score on its own—is where the more meaningful insights of this study are found.
WWE’s lowest month for sentiment was October 2019, possibly related to the poorly-received Hell in a Cell pay-per-view. Notably, none of the key months in which Vince McMahon-related news emerged were in the running for lowest monthly sentiment for WWE: months like June 2022 (when news first broke), July 2022 (when he first resigned), January 2023 (when he returned), and January 2024 (when he resigned again). However, February 2024 is noticeably down, which makes sense as his resignation and news of the Janel Grant lawsuit broke in late January. Still, there were a number of other months in WWE’s recent past that measured lower.
The low point for AEW is in April 2024, the month the company decided to air security footage from months prior of CM Punk scuffling backstage with Jack Perry, the moment that led to Punk’s firing. The highs for either are less predictable, at least to me. For WWE, it’s June 2023, a month that contained the well-received Money in the Bank in London. The high month for AEW is June 2022, which contained the well-received first Forbidden Door pay-per-view.
Since I haven’t personally pored over the multitude of comments involved, the events I point to above are simply my intuitive suggestions, and it’s possible that entirely other events played heavily into these monthly results.
Beyond those outliers, probably more insightfully, this analysis also highlights change in sentiment over the course of months and years.
The results of this analysis support a general conclusion that may already be plain to those closely following the industry: optimism around AEW was strong through mid-2022, at which point sentiment reversed course. Meanwhile, sentiment around WWE improved steadily, however, not strictly inversely to the direction of AEW sentiment; WWE sentiment began trending upward beginning in late 2020.
Perhaps contrary to a reputation for negativity among wrestling fans who frequently engage in discussion online, there was never a month in this study’s 75-month timeline when average sentiment for either company was negative.
Why r/SquaredCircle?
r/SquaredCircle has over 1 million users subscribed. Multiple thousands of accounts are often simultaneously active, according to Reddit’s interface. While it’s important to acknowledge that an individual person may operate multiple accounts, the dataset used here was large, measuring about 5 million comments over a period of just over six years.
How did you get this data?
The data for ostensibly every comment in r/SquaredCircle’s archive through the end of December 2024 is available through Academic Torrents, which was relied on for this study. Academic Torrents is a non-profit data-sharing platform that hosts large public datasets, not limited to Reddit data, for academic and research use. The website is supported by university researchers and is used in many academic studies.
I started this study by downloading a 72.1 gigabyte JSON file that contained comments posted to the subreddit from 2012 through 2024.
For this project, in favor of focusing on recent wrestling history since the introduction of All Elite Wrestling, October 1, 2018, was selected as the starting point, so that we may account for any early discussions related to what would become All Elite Wrestling, even though AEW wasn’t formally introduced to the public until a few months later.
What the data looks like
More than 40 million comments on the subreddit from October 1, 2018, to December 31, 2024, were narrowed down to a total of 4,992,343 comments which could be clearly assigned to WWE or AEW based on selected keywords (which are listed in the next section). 3,611,620 comments were mutually exclusively assigned to WWE and 1,380,723 to AEW.
Of those comments, the WWE comments were written by at least 145,752 unique accounts and the AEW comments were written by at least 84,543 unique accounts. That doesn’t include an unknown number of accounts that were marked “[deleted]” (presumably because the account was deleted sometime later) by the time the data was collected by Academic Torrents. Among comments assigned to WWE, the median number of comments per account was 3; the average was 24.2. Among comments assigned to AEW, the median number of comments per account was 2; the average was 16.0.
Among the unique accounts identified, 69,372 accounts submitted both WWE and AEW comments. That entails that 47.6% of WWE commenters were also AEW commenters. And 82.1% of AEW commenters were also WWE commenters.
How did you determine what comments were related to AEW or WWE?
The keywords used to identify AEW- and WWE-related comments were carefully but arbitrarily chosen to focus on the companies themselves, their executive leaders, and their major branded programs, rather than attempting to catalog every wrestler or personality.
To avoid ambiguity, as each comment’s sentiment was analyzed as a whole and not in part, any comments that contained a keyword from both the WWE and the AEW lists were not included in the data analyzed here.
In the cases of “rampage” and “collision”, those words were only counted beginning on June 1, 2021, and April 1, 2023, respectively, just a few months before those AEW television programs debuted. Including these words earlier may have caused comments to be erroneously identified as AEW-related.
Adjustments also had to be made for keywords “collision”, “forbidden door”, and “dynamite”. The former two inherently carried a general negative value (think “forbidden” having a negative connotation) and “dynamite” carried an inherent positive value. All WWE keywords and all other AEW keywords used in this study had a neutral inherent value.
Sentiment over time for all the selected individual keywords can be compared using this interactive chart:
Why not include wrestlers’ names in your keywords?
The intent of this study was to identify comments where sentiment was likely directed toward the company, its leadership or its major programming, rather than isolated performers or storylines.
AEW and WWE have large and changing rosters. Some wrestlers (including high-profile ones like Cody Rhodes and CM Punk) appeared with both companies during the timeline. Maintaining a current, non-overlapping list would have added complexity without proportionate analytical value.
Furthermore, the nature of fandom around individual wrestlers posed a risk of distorting the results. Fans often develop intense, personal investment in specific wrestlers, leading to sentiment that reflects excitement, frustration, or loyalty toward individual talent rather than broader opinions about the company itself. Including wrestler names would have shifted the analysis away from the intended focus — measuring sentiment toward AEW and WWE as organizations — and toward capturing volatile reactions to the careers, performances, or booking of particular performers.
How did you determine whether the sentiment of a comment was positive, negative, or neutral?
VADER (which stands for Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner) is a rule-based sentiment analysis tool that’s specifically designed for social media text that often consists of short comments and informal language. VADER assigns each comment a compound score, ranging from -1.00 (extremely negative) to +1.00 (extremely positive) based on the presence of words and phrases found in VADER’s manually curated sentiment dictionary, combined with intensity modifiers like punctuation and capitalization.
In simpler terms, VADER has a list of thousands of words that people usually think of as positive or negative. For example, words like “great” or “amazing” make a given score higher. Words like “terrible” or “boring” lower the score. The tool also accounts for things like exclamation points, all caps, or adverbs like “very” that are used to express stronger feelings. All the words in a given comment were taken into account and their sentiment values added up (hence “compound score”) to decide whether a sentence measured as positive, negative, or neutral overall.
What the data tells us
These findings reflect a broader reality that’s emerged in the wrestling industry over the last several years, this data aside: namely, that AEW’s favorability with engaged fans rose through 2022 before entering a sustained decline thereafter, while WWE’s favorability increased in recent years. That story is supported by other metrics including TV ratings and live event attendance.
While the correlation isn’t overwhelmingly lockstep, this analysis supports a notion that trends in online fan sentiment, when measured across a forum as large and active as r/SquaredCircle, are meaningfully related to trends in these wrestling companies’ consumer-driven businesses. That relationship may seem intuitive to those unacquainted with how wrestling fans are often perceived by those inside and outside the business, but it’s a notion often dismissed. When sentiment is tracked systematically and at scale, though, rather than through anecdotes or viral reactions, it begins to actually align with trends in attendance and possibly other engagement metrics.
This is more evident in AEW’s case.
While a sample of just fourteen data points limits the ability to draw firm predictive conclusions, linear correlation is applied here to impose a strict, quantitative test on the relationship.
Quarterly averages show a strong linear relationship between sentiment toward AEW measured here and attendance of its weekly television events (Dynamite, Collision, and Rampage). The correlation is high (R=0.8218), and the coefficient of determination (R²=0.6754) suggests that about 68% of the variation in AEW attendance can be statistically explained by changes in sentiment within this community.
The correlation for WWE’s weekly TV events (Raw and Smackdown) is weaker (R=0.6840, R²=0.4679), but far from random. WWE’s higher baseline attendance and more entrenched brand might insulate it from swings in sentiment—or maybe AEW fans are just more online than WWE fans.
But it’s notable that while WrestleTix estimates of tickets distributed for Raw and Smackdown have sequentially continued to increase (and doing so despite rising ticket prices), sentiment for WWE on r/SquaredCircle peaked in mid-2023.
Of course, correlation doesn’t establish causality. Fan sentiment doesn’t by itself drive attendance or ticket sales, nor would I suggest attendance strongly shapes sentiment (though there may well be something to the notion that a wrestling event in front of a big crowd adds to a wrestling fan’s positive experience). Nonetheless, this study does point to a significant conclusion: online sentiment, when measured at scale and averaged over time, moves in alignment with at least some key business indicators.
The suggestion here isn’t that online sentiment entirely predicts business outcomes in the wrestling industry. That’s especially so when contrasting against business-to-business revenue streams like guaranteed media rights payments. But the sentiment of a large fan community like r/SquaredCircle, when measured over time and at scale, can’t be easily dismissed and may be a meaningful signal.
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Brandon Thurston has written about wrestling business since 2015. He operates and owns Wrestlenomics.
This is of course not meant to be a final word on the subject, but instead is a data-driven look at the relationship between match length and perceived match quality.
The chart above plots Cagematch.net ratings against match duration, sourcing the more than 43,000 matches in the database that have the required minimum of 5 votes to display a rating. The matches go from the present all the way back to 1929. (Yes, there’s a Gus Sonnenberg vs. Ed Stranger Lewis match from 1929 that has 6 votes on the site, which I assume there’s video for online somewhere but I couldn’t quickly find it.).
Each dot above (whose opacity is greatly reduced to make for a more meaningful chart) represents a match. The light blue line represents the smoothed median rating (using LOESS), showing the general trend of how match duration correlates with Cagematch voter ratings.
At first, as you can see, match ratings rise sharply as match time goes on. It’s important to note that Cagematch only allows users to rate matches that are at least five minutes long, so the shortest matches in this study start there. A match at the minimum five minutes starts with a typical rating of around 5.0. Ratings generally improve as duration increases. The trend rises at a similar rate up to the 15-minute mark or so. Then past the 20-minute mark, the trend still rises but at a slower rate.
Intuitively, I think many would agree that a match that has the potential to be received by the typical Cagematch voter as a good match is generally well-served with a match time that’s somewhere over 10 minutes, and maybe under 20 minutes. That supposition probably also rests on the notion that, generally, greater match time is given to matches that will benefit from it. That is, a rational wrestling booker usually doesn’t put weaker performers or a weaker match in a position to go long, but rather the other way around. At least among rated matches, that seems to generally be the case. Maybe rationality is common among wrestling bookers after all, if specifically on the issue of match time.
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The challenge of a match being rated higher seems to increase the farther you go over the 30-minute mark. And, again, that seems to make intuitive sense. Wrestlers who are quite good might be capable of a really good match if given 10 to 20 minutes, but going over 30 minutes generally calls for an exceptional match and/or exceptional performers. By contrast, wrestling fans are familiar with the experience of watching a match that goes on too long, which would’ve been better if it had been at least a few minutes shorter.
I can hear already some readers announcing their preference for matches that stay under a certain time limit. But we unsurprisingly have relatively little data on really long matches. Just 3% of all rated matches went 30 minutes or longer.
You’ll notice the trendline starts bending in a negative direction after about the 40-minute mark. One more insight we can draw, which probably also affirms intuitions, is that this seems to be mainly an effect caused by older matches, rather than more recent ones. That is, older matches — which often did go longer — may have the disadvantage of being viewed by Cagematch “inmates” with modern eyes (the earliest ratings seem to be from around 2009) who have seen plenty of wrestling in a style that evolved long after the match in question. Certainly, matches from, say, the 1970s generally had different goals (not to mention an audience with very different predispositions about what they were watching) than matches in the 2020s. And the concept of “match quality” was probably nascent at best. Jack Brisco and Giant Baba probably didn’t expect that, a few decades later, their NWA title matches would be appraised on a scale from 1 to 10 by people not even born yet.
On the other hand, when we’re talking about 40-minute matches, we should probably be cautious. There are just 312 matches with ratings in the Cagematch database that went at least 40 minutes, which is less than 1% of all 43,390 rated matches. Nonetheless, if we separate, say, all matches from 2020 and after from all matches before 2020, we see a really straight line for matches beyond 40 minutes for the later period.
In both the 1929–2019 and 2020–present time segments, again, we’re of course talking about relatively small portions of the overall data that go 40 minutes or more: 0.3% (94 matches) for 2020 to the present; 1.2% (219 matches) for pre-2020.
I suppose what I think the blue trendline really represents is sort of the burden of expectation, which generally rises the longer the match goes on. The more time you ask for from the audience, the “value” of the match (whatever that is — whether you think the Cagematch voters have it right or you think it should be something totally different) needs to also increase. You could apply that notion to a lot of forms of entertainment, including, say, movies. If a short movie or book is bad, that’s one thing. But if it goes on forever and it’s bad, that’s worse because of the amount of time it demanded from you. If it’s unusually long, it’d better be great, and wrestling, like films and novels, carries a similar expectation for an epic to justify its length.
Brandon Thurston has written about wrestling business since 2015. He operates and owns Wrestlenomics.
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The premiere episode of WWE Raw on Netflix was slotted at #4 for the week, according to Netflix’s weekly top 10 that ranks its most-watched shows from Monday through Sunday.
Raw had 5.9 million “views” through the seven-day period, which is kind of like a worldwide DVR+7 measurement. “Views” is basically the number of viewers, averaged by the minute, as it’s the total number of hours viewed divided by the duration. In Nielsen terms, that’s basically the average minute audience (AMA) measurement of viewers that we’re familiar with.
As reported last week, in the U.S., the show averaged 2.6 million accounts, live+same-day, according to third-party analytics firm VideoAmp, which is comparable to the 1.22 million households that Nielsen measured watched Raw on average on the USA Network throughout 2024.
Netflix shows weekly rankings for the U.S. and all regions but doesn’t reveal the viewership data like it does for the global list. In the U.S., Raw ranked #5 for the week.
Globally, live and through the first day, it averaged a total of 4.9 million, according to Netflix’s first-party data. So the full week tacked on an extra 1 million accounts globally.
We don’t have data yet on this past Monday, January 13, but expect that viewership will be substantially down from the heavily-hyped premiere.
Brandon Thurston has written about wrestling business since 2015. He operates and owns Wrestlenomics.
