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>It also needs to be considered that USA and Fox have very different uses for their WWE shows. Raw and, to a lesser extent, SmackDown, served the role of keeping USA at or near the top of the cable heap in terms of their prime time average. Fox is a major broadcast network and doesn't need that. But as expensive as the current WWE slate is by historical pro wrestling programming standards, $3.94 million/week to fill Fox's entire prime time slate on Friday is an absolute bargain relative to whatever else Fox would be putting there. Also, even in the event that Fox might lose money—maybe not nine figures, but some money—on SmackDown's rights fees relative to sponsorship revenue, that cannot be looked at in a vacuum. After all, advertising is just half of Fox's revenue.
>As reported by Multichannel News in May, one of the reasons that Fox has put a priority on live sports programming—a category that they've assigned SmackDown to—is so Fox stations can charge cable companies higher retransmission fees. SmackDown is, after all, the only sports property on Fox that will air every week without an offseason. And according to a July article from Radio and Television Business Report, as far as revenue to Fox goes, the retransmission fee revenue for Fox doesn't just apply to their wholly owned and operated stations. Fox affiliates owned by third party station groups like Gray Television or Nexstar Media Group, among others, also "send back" half of their retransmission fees to the network. That brings us back to the end of the previous paragraph: The other half of Fox's revenue comes from affiliate fees, which includes Fox's share of the affiliates' cable retransmission fees.
