AEW & ROH President Tony Khan held a call yesterday with the pro-wrestling media to hype up this Friday’s ROH Final Battle pay-per-view in Garland, Texas. One of the topics discussed on the call was Khan’s decision to air the show on HonorClub rather than traditional pay-per-view services. He explains that this was to help drive up subscribers to Honor Club and that the experiment has paid off.
This has been tremendously successful in terms of gaining new subscribers. As an experiment, I think it’s been a big win. Coming up on Worlds End, I think it made sense for the timing of this event, at least as it stands right now, but we’ve had great returns on ROH pay-per-views. There is definitely a market for it. When we’ve put on these events, we’ve seen big box office returns. It’s been a great part of the investment. When you look at the revenues off of the pay-per-views, they are the biggest revenues ROH has ever done on pay-per-view. If we do decide to go back to or stay with that model long-term, it’ll be because we’ve had a lot of success as promoters with AEW and now ROH at selling pay-per-views. This is putting some folks on Watch ROH, the HonorClub product. We’ve been able to drive more subscribers in recent weeks, and expect to have another big week for subscribers with Final Battle as we’ve seen an increase on the run up to the event. We have a lot of options for how we want to disseminate the content going forward for streaming vs. pay-per-view or whatever combination. This has definitely been a successful experiment to grow Watch ROH,
A full recap of the Final Battle media call can be found here.