By James Caldwell, PWTorch assistant editor

WWE issued a press release announcing "nearly 400,000 domestic PPV buys" for WrestleMania 30. Combined with the initial WWE Network subscriber count being 667,000, WWE claimed one million households watched WrestleMania.

WWE's claim requires every Network subscriber to have watched WM30. WWE added that based on the number of Network subscriptions and domestic PPV buys, "WWE is confident that it will reach its goal of 1 million subscribers by the end of 2014."

WWE also said that 7.1 million hours of video content was viewed on the Network during WrestleMania Week, which they marked as Tuesday, April 1 through Tuesday, April 8. That translates to each subscriber watching an average of 10.6 hours of content.

Specific to the domestic PPV buys figure, 400,000 for WM30 compares to 650,000 for WM29 (38 percent difference) and 715,000 for WM28 (44 percent difference).

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Caldwell's Analysis: WWE is playing fast and loose with the numbers. We don't have a percentage of how many Network subscribers actually watched WM30, but assuredly a material amount of subscribers did not watch WM30 on an individual basis, either because they watched with buddies, ordered the Network for the tape library, were not into the current product and skipped Mania, or for some other reason. Also, WWE believing they can convert 400,000 people who were willing to spend $60+ on WM30 when a $9.99 option was available on the Network into Network subscribers is a stretch.

Keller's Analysis WWE has to be encouraged by this number in that they retained a lot of people willing to pay top dollar for WM despite the availability of the Network. They knew there would be some canibalization of PPV buys, but to retain well over half of the PPV buys could be enough to keep cable and satellite companies in the PPV game. DirecTV, though, decided not to carry WWE PPVs after they had knowledge of their PPV buy data, so maybe they see the drop as discouraging, whereas it seems to be encouraging to me that so many still ordered at full price. That said, cable and satellite customers who cannot get future PPVs might be more likely to order the Network going forward, which is where WWE's optimism comes from. Converting all of them, though, is a big stretch, as James pointed out. All in all, this means that they should still have a healthy WrestleMania PPV buy number in the 700,000+ range once international buys are accounted for, unless there was a big drop in buys overseas without Rock on the show.

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