January 30th, 2024, Rishad Dsouza
Come 2025, the WWE Raw is going to come to Netflix in an exclusive deal, the company announced earlier this week. We look at YouGov data to understand the degree of the cross-over in audiences of two brands as it stands today to get a sense of what opportunities the deal could present.
Examining streaming services that WWE followers use on a regular basis, nearly half of them say they use Netflix (50%). This makes Netflix the second-most popular streaming service behind only YouTube (57%). This also means that WWE followers at the moment are about as likely as the general US audience (51%) to regularly use Netflix. And there’s reason to believe that usership among WWE followers could rise once the deal takes effect – WWE fans are far likelier than the national population to be regular users of NBC’s Peacock, which currently owns rights to WWE streaming in the US (34% vs 20%).
As things stand, Netflix already has fairly solid standing among current WWE fans who are not Netflix users. A third of them regard Netflix as representing good quality (34%), and a quarter of them believe that Netflix offers a good value for money proposition (24%), although 20% do feel that Netflix doesn’t. It’s very likely that these metrics will only improve once the deal takes effect.
For WWE too this could be a chance to attract a higher proportion of fans. Currently, about a tenth (11%) of those who use Netflix regularly say they watched or followed WWE in the past year – the same as the overall population (10%). Getting featured on Netflix could be an opportunity for WWE to spread its wings and perhaps carve out a bigger share of customers.
This opportunity might be most pronounced among younger Americans. Adults aged 18-29 make up a much larger share of all Netflix users (27%) compared to their share in the group of WWE fans overall (18%). Just being on Netflix might expose a bigger share of younger audiences to WWE.
It will be interesting to monitor how fans of WWE react to the development. YouGov BrandIndex tracks both Netflix and WWE (in addition to hundreds of other brands) in the US on a daily basis, but it’s too soon to peer into that data yet, with the news having broken only on the 23rd.
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