WWE
#Thank you, and good morning, everyone.
Welcome to WWE's Second Quarter 2017 Earnings Conference Call.
Leading today's discussion are Vince <UNK>, our Chairman and CEO; <UNK> <UNK>arrios, our Chief Strategy and Financial Officer; and <UNK> <UNK>, our Chief Revenue and Marketing Officer.
We issued our earnings release earlier this morning and have posted the release, our earnings presentation and other supporting materials on our website, corporate.
wwe.com/investors.
Today's discussion will include forward-looking statements.
These forward-looking statements reflect our current views, are based on various assumptions and are subject to risks and uncertainties disclosed in our SEC filings.
<UNK>ctual results may differ materially, and undue reliance should not be placed on them.
<UNK>dditionally, the matters we will be discussing today may include non-G<UNK><UNK>P financial measures.
Reconciliation of non-G<UNK><UNK>P to G<UNK><UNK>P information is set forth in our earnings release and presentation, which are available on our website.
Finally, as a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded and the replay will be available on our website later today.
<UNK>t this time, it's my privilege to turn the call over to Vince.
Good morning, everyone.
We are pleased with execution of our strategy to optimize our long-term value of our content.
<UNK>s you know, revenue increased 8% to a quarterly record of $215 million.
<UNK>nd we delivered our earnings results pretty much essentially in line with our guidance.
Live event revenue increased to quarterly record of $53 million, which I think is notable.
We are reaching 85 million year-to-date with our global attendance up about 100,000.
The Network segment reached a quarterly record of $55 million as our WWE network paid subscribers increased 8%.
Similar interesting things that we've got on as well is ---+ there's something called the Mae Young Classic named after one of our more extraordinary female performers of the past.
It's one of things that Paul Levesque is putting together for us as he did the Cruiserweight and, of course, all the young individuals who are scheduled to one-day compete for us down at the Performance Center.
The Mae Young Classic is really an opportunity to bring up young female performers, which is very ---+ is vital actually to our overall product, many of the quarter hours you see in television reflect our women superstars.
So this is an opportunity, obviously, to grow that base, which we haven't done all that well in the past.
Overall, one of the things that I look at as one of my barometers is the overall interest in the product.
<UNK>nd for the first 6 months of the year, our digital video views reached 9.1 billion, which is pretty much extraordinary.
It's up 18%.
Our social media followers continue ---+ certainly surpassed the 800 million, which again I think is a tremendous indication in the overall interest in our product.
That's always been one of my big barometers.
Global sponsorship looked pretty good.
Its revenue grew up ---+ grew about 25%.
Some of the more blue-chip advertisers have joined us, KFC, Nestl\xe9, <UNK>T&T and some gaming partners as well.
We have selected Lagard\xe8re in terms of our best-in-class marketing agency to help us develop our global sponsorship business.
Other notable things going on, we have a live event in Shenzhen over in China on September 17, which is going well and just part of our strategy in China, which looks good to-date.
<UNK>nd we localized some of our weekly television shows, which is working out well for us in India and in the Middle East.
We will probably continue to do more of that going forward in other markets.
When we speak of other markets, we completed a multi-year agreement to televise Raw and SmackDown on SuperSport, which is definitely the way to go, that's <UNK>frica's premier sports broadcaster.
Those are some of the things that we've got going on among others.
Thank you, <UNK>.
<UNK>, we are ready now.
Please open the lines for questions.
Thank you, everyone.
We appreciate you listening to the call today.
If you have any questions please don't hesitate to reach out to us.
