Earnings Call Excerpt
World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. (WWE)
Q3 2009 Earnings Call
November 05, 2009 11:00 am ET
Executives
Michael Weitz - VP, Investor Relations
Vince McMahon - Chairman and CEO
George Barrios - CFO
Donna Goldsmith - COO
Analysts
Jerry Tang - ROTH Capital Partners
Michael Kupinski - Noble Financial
Presentation
Michael Weitz
Thank you and good morning everyone. Welcome to World Wrestling Entertainment’s third quarter 2009 Earnings Conference Call. Joining me for today's discussion are Vince McMahon our Chairman and CEO, Donna Goldsmith our COO and George Barrios our CFO.
This morning we issued two press releases, one detailing our results for the quarter and the other outlining our revised business outlook. In addition to these releases, we will reference the presentation as part of our discussion. These are available on our corporate website at corporate.wwe.com.
We will make several forward-looking statements today as part of our discussion. These statements are based on management's estimates. Actual results may differ due to numerous factors, which are referenced on page one of the presentation.
These risks and uncertainties are discussed in more detail on our filings with the SEC. Reconciliations of non-GAAP financial information discussed on this call can be found in our earnings release or on our website. Today, we will review our financial results for the quarter and we'll provide some perspective on our revised outlook. We will follow this review with a Q&A session.
At this time, it is my privilege to turn the call over to Vince.
Vince McMahon
Good morning, everyone. I just want to give you a quick overview on how things are looking from my point of view on things. I think we had a relatively good quarter. As the quarter relates to the entire year looking even better than what it is now.
One of my big parameters on how well we are doing is the average attendance to live events because when you consider that and I've mentioned this before it is the most expensive way in which our consumer enjoys the product, with parking ticket prices, hot dogs, programs et cetera, et cetera. It indicates to me the strength or lack of it in terms of where we are.
Even though we had at several more events in the quarter, but the average approximately 9% and another parameter which I use is television ratings. It isn’t always necessarily that either one of these to be a direct correlation, but the two of them together would indicate things are pretty strong, not only we have an increase in attendance, but our television ratings for our Raw program were up about 23% over the quarter.
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