The wrestling media, such as it is, is telling us that Mandy Rose made half a million dollars in a week after being released from WWE from new subscriptions to her boudoir website.
After doing the back of the envelope math, no, she didn’t.
Here’s the math.
We’re told that she increased the monthly subscription to $40 a month, so right there, for Rose to have made $500,000 free and clear and in her pocket after being released by WWE, we’re talking 12,500 new subscribers, right off the top.
Factor in that FanTime, the subscription service that she uses, takes 20 percent, and you’d have to up the number of new subscribers to 15,000.
Now, keep in mind that we were told early on in the generated controversy over this that Rose had already been making more from her FanTime account than she’d been getting paid for being the NXT champ.
WWE doesn’t make what it pays its talents publicly available, but the best guess for Rose is that she was making somewhere in the range of $150,000 a year, and that may be on the high end, but we’ll go with that.
I’m seeing speculation on wrestling news websites that Rose had in the range of 10,000 FanTime subscribers before she was let go by WWE.
Doing the math there, that would mean that she would have been bringing in around $180,000 a month at her previous $20 a month subscription fee.
With emphasis: $180,000 a month for her FanTime website, $150,000 a year from WWE.
If that is anywhere near accurate, Rose wouldn’t have had to have been released by WWE; she would have quit a while ago.
Logic dictates that she didn’t have anywhere near the number of subscribers that people have been speculating.
It seems more logical that she would have been bringing in something comparable on an annual basis to her WWE salary, which would put her subscriber base more in the range of 1,000 per month.
The idea that she’d have 10,000 people paying $20 a month to see photos and videos of her in bikinis and lingerie stretches credulity, considering the plethora of options for photos and videos of women in bikinis and lingerie, and a lot, lot less, for people who want access to such content.
Still, a side hustle bringing in a couple hundred thousand per year is nothing to sneeze at, and credit to her and her agent for figuring out a way to make more money off her good looks.
I think we can guess why there’d be pressure to provide content that is more risqué, which is what ran her afoul of what WWE would feel comfortable with.
At some point, people paying 20 bucks a month for the same ol’, same ol’ are going to let their subscriptions lapse, without something pushing the envelope to induce them.
That’s why this became news.
I’ll speculate here that her numbers might have been going down, so she raised the stakes with content that would stop the bleeding.
Which gets us to, then, the reported $500,000 windfall she’s claiming since her release.
There has to be some assumption behind that number that the new subscribers at the higher $40 per month rate are annuals, not one-offs.
If you go with that thinking, right around 1,000 new subscribers paying $40 could be the basis of the claim that she made $500,000 in a week.
Basically, if I’m anywhere close with my assumptions, she went from 1,000 paid to 2,000 paid.
The challenge for her will be maintaining her subscriber base without the free advertising she was getting from being on national TV through WWE every week.
Two ways this goes from here: she has her agent reach out to AEW for a job that keeps her in the public eye, or the content on her site ratchets up from bikini and underwear pics in the direction of soft-core porn.
There’s more longevity to the wrestling route, even with the need to take bumps.
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Chris Graham
