How much will AEW get from its next TV deal? The math tells me $200M-plus per year

Austin Karp, who writes for Sports Business Journal, said this week on “Busted Open Radio” that he expects AEW will get between $110 million and $115 million a year with its next TV deal, which he thinks will come with Warner Brothers Discovery, the current TV partner with AEW.

AEW originally signed a deal with WBD that paid out $45 million a year for the TV rights to “Dynamite,” which increased to an estimated $70 million a year with the debut of “Rampage” in 2021, and the later addition of “Collision” in 2023.

Against that backdrop, $110 million to $115 million a year would be a modest increase, particularly when set against the huge money that WWE got from its new deals for “Raw” and “Smackdown.”

Netflix agreed to a 10-year, $5 billion (with a b-) deal to acquire the rights to “Raw,” and NBCUniversal agreed to a five-year, $1.4 billion deal to get the rights to “Smackdown.”

That works out to $500 million a year for “Raw,” $287 million a year for “Smackdown,” and then a throw-in, WWE is moving “NXT” to The CW for $25 million a year.

I did some back-of-the-envelope math based on those figures, and the viewer numbers for each of those shows, to try to come up with my own somewhat-educated guess on what AEW could expect from its next TV deal.

What I’ve come up with is:

• Netflix is paying $3.2 million per hour of “Raw” content to reach an audience that, right now, on USA Network, is getting in the range of 1.7 million viewers per broadcast hour.
• NBCUniversal is paying $2.7 million per hour of “Smackdown” to reach an audience that is getting around 2.4 million viewers per broadcast hour on Fox, but you can expect that number to decline when it comes back to basic cable from a broadcast network, probably more in the range of where “Raw” is now.
• The CW is getting a deal: $240,000 an hour to reach between 650,000-700,000 viewers for “NXT.”

AEW is currently getting in the range of 700,000-750,000 viewers for its two-hour “Dynamite,” 400,000 viewers for its two-hour “Collision,” and 300,000 viewers for its hour-long “Rampage.”

The viewer numbers are closer, obviously, to where “NXT” is, but again, WWE practically gave the TV rights to The CW.

Based on my basic math here, the TV rights for “NXT” are actually worth closer to $110 million a year, and that’s for two hours of TV per week.

AEW provides WBD a total of five hours of TV per week. With WBD just losing its long-standing NBA TV deal, there could be interest in giving AEW better day and time slots for “Rampage” (currently airing on Fridays at 10 p.m. ET) and “Collision” (currently airing on Saturdays at 8 p.m. ET).

Better time slots for the B and C shows would improve the numbers for those shows, and consistent start times (i.e. not having to pre-empt for the NBA) will help across the board.

But that’s an unknown. I’d make it part of my sales pitch if I were Tony Khan, but, yeah, it’s just conjecture right now.

In the here and now, the average hour of AEW programming is worth in the range of $825,000 per, which works out to $4.1 million per week, or $215 million per year.

I’m not seeing anybody else out there in the sports-business media projecting that kind of number for a new AEW deal, so it makes me a little uncomfortable to throw it out there.

But I’m also a numbers guy, and this is where the numbers have led me.