This only makes sense for the talent if WWE can increase the overall revenue on twitch therefore making the talent more overall money but at the same time taking a cut for the company.
If all stays the same, this is a bad deal for the talent.
I need to model it out in excel and I don’t understand the bonus structure in WWE to know where they get additive revenue but if it’s all counting against guaranteed money it doesn’t even make sense any way. So they were already getting paid that money.
If you go from 50k to 200k,
You just ate into your downside. You were getting that money anyway!! You coulda done no work on twitch and got paid that money.
Oh it’s all against the downside? Sorry, I misread it. If that’s the case then this is stupid. Why even do it??
It’s like asking NFL players to go to 18 games even tho they have guaranteed money for 17 and telling them, well yeah you get paid for the 18th game but the avg per game goes down, not your pay goes up.
I should say, that’s the way I read the reporting. I could be totally misunderstanding it.
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I genuinely don’t think this news is completely accurate. WWE are definitely trying to get a cut of the pie as they view it as money being made on the fame that they’re providing the wrestlers with but the reporting of the specific details of WWE’s plan doesn’t seem right.
I’m going off of what the supposed hero, Andrew Yang, is saying as far as it being an obligation. “If talent doesn’t stream they will forego earnings, be suspended or face penalties”. A hell of a thing to say if it’s nonsense.
Yeah that is the way I read it. If they want to put that into future contracts moving forward then that is their prerogative, but it makes no sense they could do this with an existing contract.
He said “twitch will become a work obligation”, speculating down the line in the future. In your post you claimed he said wrestlers “are obligated to use twitch”, which is totally different.
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Here’s a very informative article by PWInsider’s Mike Johnson. A bunch of details from.anonymous talents.
BREAKING DOWN WWE TALENT FRUSTRATIONS AS THEIR TWITCH INDEPENDENCE COMES TO AN END
by Mike Johnson @ 6:49 PM on 10/2/2020There is a moment in the classic Keanu Reeves film The Matrix, where Lawrence Fishburne’s character Morpheus offered Reeves’ character Neo the choice of a red pill or a blue pill. If he takes the red pill, nothing will ever be the same. If he takes the blue, everything will be as it was.
In many ways, that is the moment WWE talents are facing right now, except the only choice is the red pill and nothing will be the same.
In a situation that has grown increasingly frustrating for talents who have used Twitch as a way to build their personal brands (and been paid well to do so), WWE, in preparation for launching their own larger scale Twitch presence has all but told those talents that they will be handing the channels over to WWE or be in violation of their WWE contracts.
In the eyes of those talents, there is no blue pill.
In speaking to several talents today under the condition of anonymity, their frustrations were varied.
For some, it was that they had been encouraged to build their own brand and now see them being absorbed into the WWE machine, losing some of the independence those accounts afforded them.
For some, it’s that they were told a month ago that as long as they maintained their social media brands under their own real life names, it wouldn’t be an issue. That sign of relief has disappeared after just four short weeks
For some, it’s losing the income that has helped support them, knowing full well that once WWE takes over, they will never make the same level of money again from their Twitch endeavors. Even with the 50% Twitch would take from subscriptions and tips, for some, it was quite substantial. Under WWE’s purview, they will receive whatever percentage the company pays out, and as some fear, that’s only if that money exceeds their downside guarantees, since Twitch would now fall under that umbrella.
However, the one connecting frustration across all talents who are upset is the realization that they will soon be required to stream and appear on Twitch as part of their WWE booking contracts. All of the talents told a very similar story, which is that they have been informed that even if they now chose to shutter their personal accounts instead of letting WWE take them over, they will still be booked to appear and stream as part of WWE’s planned larger-scale Twitch presence going forward. So, like a casino, either way, the house wins.
Once WWE’s new Twitch strategy manifests, talent appearances will be just another appearance by the company - no different from a match on a house show or an autograph signing in the pre-COVID days - and would not result in an extra payday. Instead, those Twitch appearances will morph into another requirement of the talents’ booking contracts as part of their downside guarantee. Instead of being the home they built for themselves, Twitch will instead be someone else’s property.
When you look on the other side of the coin, one can understand why WWE are making these moves. After all, they themselves have lost sizable revenue from live events, VIP signings, etc. Yes, they are making more revenue than ever before based on their TV deals, empowered even more by cutbacks they have made in the post-COVID world. Still, there had to be new ways to make revenue as they try to navigate the new reality of producing content for a touring company that can no longer tour.
At the end of the day, WWE is a publicly traded company and like a vampire, there is an insatiable hunger. Public companies don’t rest on their laurels if they want to be successful. They have a never ending need to grow, to evolve and to quite frankly, squeeze more value out of themselves for their stockholders and something has to give under that pressure. For the talents we’ve spoken to, however, what is being crushed under the pressure is their money and their peace of mind.
Still, in the eyes of WWE, the moves are closing something of a loophole that has existed over the past 2-3 years. WWE has decided to settle the Wild, Wild West of the online platforms in order to ensure that the flow of money and attention comes through their doors. One can understand why WWE wants that loophole closed from their perspective - because in their mind, they are the lifeblood for those talents - and without WWE’s platform to begin with, those talents don’t become stars.
Of course, one can argue the exact opposite and in the end we’d be right back where we started. There is always going to be a push and pull between promoter and talent. Pro wrestlers always think they are worth more than they are being paid, they always want to be pushed harder and they want to be the star. That is part of human nature, a push to be grander and greater, especially in the stranger than fiction world that is pro wrestling. Meanwhile, promoters want to get the most they can out of their talents, because it’s their show and they want to make the most they can for their dollar. In professional wrestling, this is the way.
However, for the talents we spoke with, this feels different. Twitch was a platform where talents could carve out their own little corner of the world, have a direct one on one relationship with their fans and be paid for it. One talent even joked that they realized on the outside looking in, they knew someone would say they are just mad about losing money when they are already making more than they ever could have hoped for when they broke into professional wrestling.
They admitted they could see why one would say that, but that losing that ability to cut back and have fun streaming was more than just losing extra money. It was a place where they could be themselves and be proud of something they built, something that will now be replaced by a new version where they stream under WWE’s rules and parameters, spending the same time and making the same effort, but losing not just the same money but the same sense of satisfaction that came with the success of their Twitch accounts. Watching that sense of satisfaction being “bulldozed over” as one talent described it, it feels as if they were being punished for becoming successful beyond WWE.
Whether that is the reality or not, for talents, some of whom stated that on good months, they could bring in revenue close to their regular WWE salaries, this pill is indeed becoming quite the bitter one to follow - and just like Neo, what happens once they swallow has yet to be explored.
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To this I’ll say FK off and good riddance. Especially if you are forcing me to sign a new deal to hand you down something that is MINE to begin with - I’ll have my lawyer ready and will rip you a new a**hole.
If you are a newcomer to the company and you sign this deal then this is a bit different, I guess*, one can argue with that, but for the people already on the inside this sounds insane to me.
I can also see how making it part of the job will kill your enthusiasm of doing it. It becomes another fake in a bubble of fake.
- Kevin STEEN had to close his YouTube channel when he signed (or was something twitter, can’t remember exactly. He was doing videos of himself traveling to events with small pulls of the curtains in the backstage area).
I think it depends who you are. If you’re An AJ Styles and you’re making 3.5mil a year (that’s what I’ve read, can’t say 100%) then you probably aren’t going to care that much, but if you’re someone like a Paige, I can see this being very very frustrating.
And how about the Mia Yim case. How do you see WWE taking 50% off of charity:
*BTW I am not following any of these wrestlers, but those tweets are coming out in my feed for some reason.
Yup, very very bad look on WWE’s part.
He said that if they don’t stream, they’ll be punished. His words, not mine.
Regarding the possible new requirement that talent sign new twitch-inclusive contracts:
WWE has a lot of talent under contract. I wonder how many are there just because they know their WWE-downside is sufficient for their needs and that if they weren’t signed with WWE they’d have to work a lot harder on the independents to make the equivalent amount of money.
The guys on top (and I suspect it is all guys, as the female talent aren’t paid as much) who have multimillion dollar contracts probably don’t care. When after taxes you’re still netting a seven figure annual income life is different than for those of us (like, nearly all of us) who have to struggle to buy a house, etc.
If the stories coming out are true, I don’t know how they comport with the Twitch rules. For all we know, WWE and Amazon may have an agreement where WWE is encouraged to provide content on Twitch. Something like that will eventually come out, but maybe it is only in the works for now.
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Yeah I’m sure the main event guys do not care but I’m wondering how this would impact a guy like Adam Cole or other people in NXT. Or any mid to lower card talent in WWE.
Having a lucrative Twitch stream could be a massive difference maker if a talent wants to sign with the company. There is a lot more competition out there and look at the recent talent cuts during a pandemic for how WWE treats its talents.
And this is just Twitch, what happens when the next big trend comes along. They are just way too late to the game IMO
If don’t care how much somebody makes, if you’re taking away $5, $5K or 50K or more from their pay, people should be pissed.
Also, does this mean literally the whole roster is up for contract negotiation, if they want to change deals right now?
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It’s hard to know how much this or that talent make from their own social media connected channels.
Youtube estimators, for example, give me around $100/day for Asuka’s Youtube channel. And Asuka has one of the more popular Youtube channels for a wrestler.
That’s not a lot of money, much less than she makes from WWE, especially as she is often on TV so likely makes much more than her downside.
I’m waiting to hear how this latest news from WWE plays out. Could be people are reporting it wrongly. We’ll see.
36,000 dollars a year is a lot of money to me.
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For the top talent won’t care or not protest, while that’s probably correct and time will tell, it’s shocking that they’d let their profession get devalued like this. If they honestly care about wrestling beyond their own means, they cannot allow their profession to be devalued so future wrestlers make less to do more. I can’t think of a single profession where that happens except for a dying industry, which maybe WWE is. Not that wrestling is dying but that WWE may be changing in a rather negative way down the road.
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