WWE YouTube Views Decline In Q3 From Last Year, Increase In Social Media Followers

WWE stock is currently down 19% since the company announced their earnings for the third quarter of 2019 last Thursday.

As previously reported, WWE managed to beat profit expectations, however they missed on revenue. The company also lowered their outlook, modifying its 2019 adjusted OIBDA target to $180 million – $190 million from $200 million.

WWE AVOD consumption (ad-supported video on demand) stayed flat from the prior year quarter with 333 million hours viewed, the same as in Q3 2018. This includes videos viewed on third party platforms (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.) as well as WWE.com and the WWE App. Global views were up 7% from 8.4 billion views to 9 billion, so while there were more views, people were spending less time on average watching each video.

WWE video views on YouTube suffered a big decline over that period, according to Social Blade. WWE garnered 2.4 billion views on their YouTube channel in Q3 of 2019, down 24% from 3.15 billion views in the same quarter in 2018.

As we previously reported, the WWE Network averaged 1.511 million paid subscribers in the third quarter of 2019, down 9.2% from the period in 2018. WWE projects the Network to have 1.43 million average paid subscribers in Q4, which would be a 10% decline from the 1.585 million subscribers in Q4 2018.

Social media followers increased 9% from 950 million in Q3 of 2018 to 1.037 billion in 2019. It should be noted that the total number of followers does not represent the number of "unique" followers, as they have not been adjusted for duplication among or within platforms. So if a person follows 5 WWE stars on Twitter and those same 5 talents on Facebook, they would be counted as 10 social media followers.