A top executive for WWE’s parent company, TKO Group Holdings, isn’t interested in giving you and your family affordable tickets to events.
Casual WWE fans may not realize that the cost for an avid supporter of the company’s content has skyrocketed over the last year. For years, you could watch all weekly shows and premium live events with a traditional television package and an affordable Peacock subscription. Those days are long gone.
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While SmackDown and NXT can be found on the USA and CW Networks, if you want to watch Raw, you need a Netflix account. To watch main roster PLE’s you’ll require the new ESPN app starting next week. And for future NXT PLEs or Saturday Night’s Main Event, you have to use Peacock. It means just watching the show has become pricey on a tight budget.
But that’s not where it ends, ticket prices have quickly been soaring during this recent boom period for the company. Especially after it was merged with UFC and went under the umbrella of TKO Group Holdings. While speaking at the annual Goldman Sachs Communacopia & Technology Conference, TKO COO Mark Shaprio explained why prices continue to rise, and it seems to be a slap in the face of WWE families.
“WWE is not where the UFC yet is on ticket yield. We have our work to do there. We know we have a lot of room there because Vince McMahon was primarily pricing tickets for families and wasn’t totally focused on maxing the opportunity there. Now that we’ve seen what we can do with UFC, we’re replicating that in terms of ticket yield and holding back and advance sales when it comes to OnLocation on the WWE side, and it’s working out really well.”
Mark Shapiro
UFC definitely does not cater to families, and is an audience heavily dominated by males in a certain age bracket. While it is one willing to pay big to go to events, it seems like Shapiro is losing sight of WWE being something that spans multiple generations after being founded in the mid-1980s.
That is not the case for the UFC, which is just entering its third decade in existence. One has to wonder if the increasing cost of being a WWE fan will turn off many of their supporters, especially families.
