Picture Credit: Netflix
It’s been exactly eighteen months since Netflix officially jumped into the squared circle, which has kick-started Netflix’s growing appetite for live sports. To date, it’s one of the only consistent sports that can be found on Netflix around the world week to week, and the latest Netflix Engagement Report provides an updated look at the viewership numbers, albeit with some pitfalls!
Now that we have three consecutive halves of Netflix Engagement Report data—covering all of 2025 and the first half of 2026—we’re continuing to get a better glimpse of how well the weekly events are performing.
If there’s one word to describe the trajectory of WWE viewership on Netflix, it’s stable. But before we crown Roman Reigns or Cody Rhodes the undisputed kings of the Netflix algorithm, we need to talk about what these numbers actually mean—and more importantly, what the data isn’t telling us.
Let’s dive into the numbers.
From Its Initial Burst to a Bulletproof Baseline
When evaluating TV viewership, especially for an episodic juggernaut like WWE, we’re looking for the “baseline”—the core audience that shows up week in and week out regardless of the card.
Monday Night Raw
As expected, the January 6, 2025 premiere of Raw on Netflix was an absolute monster, logging 6.9 million views in the first half of the year (eventually climbing to 7.2 million total). This was the honeymoon phase. Everyone tuned in to see the new set, the lack of commercial breaks, and the sheer novelty of live wrestling on the world’s biggest streamer.
But gravity always takes hold. By the end of January, the show settled into its true Netflix baseline: hovering between 3.1 million and 3.6 million views per week. As the folks over at Wrestlenomics have pointed out, Netflix’s “Global Views” metric acts very similarly to Nielsen’s traditional average TV rating—and this 3.3 million average proves WWE brought their die-hard cable base over to streaming without bleeding viewers.
In fact, Raw was such a consistent performer that it stayed in Netflix’s weekly Global Top 10 English TV list for nearly the entire year. According to Wrestlenomics, it wasn’t until late November 2025 that Raw finally fell out of the Top 10—and it took the juggernaut release of Stranger Things Season 5 to knock it off the charts.
SmackDown & NXT
We see the exact same flat, consistent trajectory for the blue and gold brands.
- SmackDown debuted in early 2025 with 1 million views. Through 2025 and H1 2026, it almost never deviates from the 800,000 to 1.1 million views range.
- NXT commands a much smaller but dedicated audience. Weekly episodes sit tight at around 200,000 to 300,000 views. The brand only sees significant spikes for Premium Live Events (PLEs) or TV specials, such as Stand & Deliver (200k views, but a massive spike in hours viewed due to its 2.5-hour runtime) and Halloween Havoc (200k views, 600k hours).
Premium Events
When looking at the big picture for WWE’s Premium Live Events on Netflix, it is completely unsurprising to see that WrestleMania continues to carry the absolute lion’s share of the engagement. The Sunday broadcast of WrestleMania 41 remains the crowned jewel of the entire viewing calendar, pulling in a massive 3.6 million views, while WrestleMania 42 Sunday proved the franchise’s long-term durability by holding onto a spectacular 3.0 million views. However, what is perhaps most impressive for Netflix is the incredibly reliable “B-show” baseline established by the surrounding monthly events. Rather than suffering steep drop-offs outside of the major stadium spectacles, marquee international events like Clash at the Castle: Italy (1.6M views) and staples like Elimination Chamber 2026 (1.9M views) are maintaining strong, predictable audiences that prove wrestling fans are using their subscriptions for more than just the flagship weekly shows.
The Pitfalls: Why the Engagement Report is Flawed for Live Sports
Here is where we have to put our data-nerd hats on. While it’s incredibly fun to go over these data dumps, Netflix’s bi-annual Engagement Report is fundamentally flawed when it comes to measuring weekly live sports.
1. The “End-of-the-Half” Handicap
As Brandon Thurston at Wrestlenomics has previously covered, the rigid six-month cutoff of Netflix’s reports severely handicaps late-period live broadcasts.
Take the June 30, 2025 episode of Raw. In the H1 2025 Engagement Report, it logged a meager 1.4 million views. Did half the audience tune out? No. Because the viewing window closed on June 30, the episode only had hours to accumulate viewing data (Looking at our updated data, it eventually picked up another 1.5 million views in H2, bringing it to a standard 3 million total). The same can now be said for the June events looking a lot lower in the charts above.
2. How people watch WWE
If you’ve been reading What’s on Netflix, you know how Netflix calculates a “View.” It’s a metric we call Completed Viewing Equivalent (CVE): Total Hours Viewed ÷ Total Runtime.
Wrestling is famously a tune-in/tune-out product. Fans might watch the opening promo, skip the mid-card, and tune back in for the main event. If 3 million people watch exactly one hour of a 3-hour episode of Raw on Netflix, Netflix’s math logs it as just 1 million views. Netflix’s metric flattens the math, hiding the true footprint of how many individual accounts actually opened the stream.
3. Live vs. VOD is a Blur
One of the main selling points of WWE on Netflix was the ability to watch Raw on Tuesday morning if you fell asleep on Monday night. The Engagement Report data lumps all of this together. We have absolutely no idea what percentage of these 3.4 million weekly Raw viewers are watching live versus catching up on VOD over the weekend.
Ultimately, a year and a half into this blockbuster streaming deal, the data tells a very specific story: WWE isn’t necessarily growing its audience on Netflix, but rather maintaining a fiercely loyal, reliable baseline. While the staggering 7.2 million views for Raw’s historic debut set a sky-high benchmark, the subsequent stabilization across all three brands—with Raw anchoring itself around 3.3 million views, SmackDown commanding roughly 920,000 international viewers, and NXT locking in a ~200k plateau—demonstrates pretty good retention.
However, any definitive narrative about a “stagnant” or “declining” trajectory into 2026 comes with a massive analytical caveat. The higher baseline numbers observed throughout 2025 were almost certainly inflated by the sheer novelty of the launch—driven by lapsed fans tuning in out of curiosity, heavy cross-promotion on the Netflix homepage, and a wave of new or returning subscribers who signed up precisely when the live weekly programming first dropped.
Then there are things outside of Netflix’s control, such as the quality of the product itself, which ebbs and flows as new storylines come and go and popular and unpopular fighters rotate on and off the roster.
You can browse all the WWE data on our Engagement Report Search, or we’ve separated all the events in a sheet here.
