You know how WWE loves to constantly brag during Monday Night Raw about how good their ratings were compared to a rerun of Bubble Guppies, how many Facebook likes Hardcore Holly has and that #AJAll is trending worldwide or whatever? It’s like, yeah, we get it, you scored a touchdown, act like you’ve been there before.
Well, as it turns out, they weren’t working us, at least for one website: WWE’s YouTube channel is immensely popular, currently sitting pretty with more than 18 million subscribers. You want to know how many people 18 million actually is? Add up the populations of Alabama, Kentucky, South Carolina and West Virginia, then throw in the population of Philadelphia for good measure, and you get approximately 18 million people. Yeah. It’s a lot of people.
What’s even crazier is that a new study conducted by AT&T reveals that the WWE’s YouTube channel is the most popular YouTube channel in five separate U.S. states — literally 1/10th of the country. The states in question? Alabama, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and West Virginia:
(View a bigger version of the map here.)
For this study, AT&T cross-referenced SocialBlade’s top 50 YouTube channels with Google Trends data to see which channels were most popular in which states. The results are certainly surprising, not so much that WWE is the biggest channel in those five particular states (I mean, c’mon, we all know the South loves wrestling), but in how WWE might view those states.
Pennsylvania certainly gets plenty of love from WWE in regards to big events, but the other states have experienced considerable PPV droughts. Kentucky’s last PPV was Backlash in 2006; Alabama’s last PPV was Armageddon in 2000; South Carolina’s last PPV was In Your House: Beware Of Dog in 1998; West Virginia has never had a WWE PPV. (In fact, West Virginia’s last televised WWE event was a random episode of Smackdown in 2006.)
On a related note, how peeved do you think Vince McMahon is that in WWE’s home state of Connecticut, the top YouTube channel is Ellen DeGeneres? Of course, she has been siphoning off some of WWE’s heat lately…
