WWE WrestlePalooza Credited for ESPN App’s Early Success – WWE WrestlePalooza has been identified as one of the driving factors behind the early success of ESPN’s new standalone streaming app. According to Sports Business Journal’s Austin Karp, the event played a major role in boosting signups for the platform ahead of its debut Premium Live Event featuring WWE content.

On this week’s episode of The Sports Media Podcast, hosted by Karp and featuring The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand and Puck’s John Ourand, the group discussed recent developments in the sports media landscape. During the “Who’s Up, Who’s Down” segment, Karp credited both ESPN and FOX for the strong launch of their respective apps, pointing to data from Antenna showing a noticeable increase in subscriptions around the time of WrestlePalooza.

“Well, my ‘Who’s Up’ is the bundle of ESPN the app and the FOX One app,” Karp said. “We saw some of the initial numbers since that began. I think the numbers there are per Antenna, not released by the networks. The ‘Who’s Up’ in this case, we’ll say [CEO of FOX Sports] Eric Shanks and [ESPN Chairman] Jimmy Pitaro.

“But a lot of good reception — they launched it right before football season. You can see the spikes when the NFL started, when college football started, and particularly late in September when ESPN had its first PLE, WrestlePalooza, really seeing a spike there in signups. So, I thought it was a really good start there,” Karp added.

WrestlePalooza marked WWE’s first-ever Premium Live Event to air on ESPN and was a major crossover success for both brands. The event featured AJ Lee’s first in-ring appearance in over a decade, teaming with CM Punk to defeat Becky Lynch and Seth Rollins. Other headline matches included Brock Lesnar vs. John Cena and Cody Rhodes defending the WWE Championship against Drew McIntyre.

The partnership between WWE and ESPN continues to show strong early results, with the sports network benefiting from WWE’s passionate fan base and major event-driven engagement.

WWE WrestlePalooza Credited for ESPN App’s Early Success

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