In this week’s wrestling post we take a look at WWE Studios and its partnership with Twitter to deliver expanded tweets.
WWE becomes Twitter partner
Earlier this week it was announced that the WWE and Twitter have entered into a partnership in which it would enable the WWE to embed content previews, view images, play videos and more straight from its tweets. The Wall Street Journal, Breaking News and TIME are also partners with Twitter in this initiative. (h/t CageSide Seats)
Payout Take: The WWE is the sports entertainment leader in social media as it has taken advantage of the platform by directing its fans to its YouTube channel, Facebook and individual performer’s twitter accounts. In addition, if you watch RAW on Monday nights, the show promotes Twitter or Facebook at every turn. It appears that the WWE’s channel on YouTube is doing well and it looks like it is attempting to garner the same success with its Twitter partnership. This gives the WWE another monetary stream to promote its product.
WWE film division revamps itself
The SBJ Fight Issue covered the restructuring of the WWE Studios division. As has been reported with each earnings call for the publicly traded WWE, the film division lags behind as a money loser for the company. As a result, the WWE is reducing its financial exposure and risk through partnership with other film studios including 20th Century Fox, Anchor Bay and Lionsgate. The move has been made in part to reach beyond the WWE’s core audience.
The story had been covered in the past. Via the NY Times from March 2012:
To reach the nonfan WWE Studios is moving more heavily into co-production, other partnerships and acquisitions. Working with partners and a budget of $15 million to $25 million, it is producing six to eight projects in 2012 for later release.
In addition, it is purchasing scripts and co-branding the films under WWE Studios and working with existing distributors to help circulate its movies worldwide. Also, another new part of the WWE Studios strategy is focusing on more PG-13 and R rated movies.
Payout Take: No word on whether this strategy will turn the WWE Studios division around but this more conservative approach of working with others in the industry makes sense. Not only can it learn from these partnerships it reduces its risk. An underlying theme here is that the WWE cannot make everyone The Rock (e.g. making its wrestlers mainstream box office hits). We will see with each earnings call how much of a turnaround the studio does.
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