Forbes Looks At WWE’s Q4 Financials, John Laurinaitis Resurfaces

Feb 16, 2015

— Forbes has released a new report that evaluates WWE’s fourth quarter financial results. The report is positive and praises WWE’s success with the WWE Network.

According to Mike Ozanian, the over-the-top carriage of the WWE Network will help drive up the network’s growth. Below are some excerpts:

Give McMahon credit for having the guts to go against conventional wisdom and critics who wanted WWE to stick exclusively with its pay-per-view model. McMahon has looked Joseph Schumpeter‘s creative destruction theory in the eye and smiled right back. It takes you know what to take a profitable business model and rip it apart, but that is exactly what McMahon has done.

Over-the-top is what will drive the WWE Network’s growth and is the wave of the future. Last year, Walt DisneyDIS +0.57% Company and the Dish Network announced a distribution agreement that provides DISH customers with access to Disney’s robust line-up of top quality sports, news and entertainment content across televisions, computers, smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles and connected devices. Sling TV, a new streaming service from Dish that was the first service that lets sports fans watch live ESPN without a cable or satellite subscription, offers ESPN and a dozen other cable channels–for only $20 a month.

– John Laurinaitis posted on his Twitter that he is in Abu Dhabi for WWE’s overseas tour there. His tweet is available below.