TKO exec on WWE ticket prices: Vince McMahon ‘wasn’t totally focused on maxing the opportunity’
A week after a clip went viral with a fan questioning WWE head Nick Khan about the increasing price of WWE tickets, the message apparently didn’t get through to TKO leadership in terms of what’s to come.
TKO chief operating officer Mark Shapiro spoke at the annual Goldman Sachs Communacopia & Technology Conference Wednesday (audio below) and in talking about ticket prices for both UFC and WWE, he said “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,” he said.
A term used commonly by concert venues, airlines and hotels, ticket yield is considered a measure of the average revenue generated per ticket sold, maximizing revenue with the goal of selling all inventory at the right mix of prices.
WWE live event & hospitality revenue finished at $185.7 million for the second quarter, up $41.4 million year over year, partially attributed to higher ticket revenue. Both WrestleMania 41 and Night of Champions from Saudi Arabia were in the second quarter.
Shapiro hasn’t been shy about saying publicly this year that TKO sees “tremendous upside” in increasing ticket prices. An example he used Wednesday was UFC shattering previous records to become the highest-grossing event in the history of Chicago’s United Center.
Site fees continue to be a key focus of TKO with Shapiro saying they need to sell out their inventory of UFC numbered events in addition to WWE PLEs before moving on to UFC Fight Nights, WWE Raw and SmackDown events.
He said they are talking to Atlanta, Charlotte, Detroit, London, Paris and that “there are no shortage of countries…that want to see us bring our show to town.” He said they will continue to maximize those opportunities with both in-kind deals (goods & services) but that the “most important to me is cash. Cash kills.”
He also had a warning of sorts for towns that are successful when WWE or UFC comes to their town, especially for the smaller events, using UFC Fight Nights as an example.
“If we have a St. Louis going up against a Des Moines, Iowa, and you want us back there and you’ve broken records and sold out both your arenas, you have to pay for us to come back or else we’ll take it to another town. And that goes for NXT, Raw and SmackDown on the WWE side.”
Shapiro also talked about how TKO hopes Wrestlepalooza will be in the same conversation as WrestleMania and SummerSlam.
Since 2011, Josh has been a contributing editor to Wrestling Observer/F4WOnline.com and also hosts the Punch-Out podcast. He has also written for Fight Magazine, Bloody Elbow, Bleacher Report, and other websites. He's a 2000 graduate of the University of Maine, worked in pro sports, and once was an indie ring announcer.