A lot of people on these forums really don't understand the complexities involved in the finances of a publicly traded company, or how wrestling is not this tiny little kayfabe world stuck in a vacuum and that it actually operates within the confines of consumer culture and the health of the open market.
The WWE is in straights very similar to Sears/K-Mart at the moment. The WWE has a lot of assets, but it has an astronomical amount of debt which has ballooned in an extremely short amount of time. Revenue is great, but if your net profits are bad and your asset-to-LTD (long-term debt & liabilities) even worse, the company is in bad shape.
SEARS
Shows Sears selling off its equity to stay afloat and eventually its total liabilities exceeding its total equity/assets.
WWE
The WWE really has no assets insofar as there probably aren't many bidders on intellectual wrestling copyrights. It's not as though they have a huge portfolio of real estate as Sears Holdings liquidated to get some extra cash flow. Thus, you can see WWE's ballooning debt load in 2016/2017 assumably used to invest and maintain their current products.
Interesting to note is that it is not as though the WWE is not raking in cash between the WWE Network, ticket gates, merchandise sales etc., even by comparison to UFC, but their associated costs could not be more different.
Despite both companies raking in massive revenue, in the 2015 fiscal year WWE recorded only $24 million in profit compared to UFC's $157 million.
From my perspective, a lot of this poor financial news is linked to the initial cost of investment for the WWE Network and finding its niche as a company within a post-cable, subscription service era of entertainment. It was also particularly trying for an episodic sports entertainment program that originally relied on PPV buys and cable ratings (i.e. advertising revenue) to transition into a subscription service without cannibalizing its own original revenue source.
All-in-all, the WWE is in a pretty poor financial state, but as far as economies of scale go, it has a great chance to recover. It has a virtual stranglehold on the marketplace, and a lot of the cost-cutting measures we see taking place have to do with increasing their margins of profit. The WWE honestly does a lot of work for very little payout. Think about
any other type of touring promotion (e.g. bands, artists, orchestras/symphonies, UFC, Disney on Ice): expecting $100 million in revenue and upwards of $50 million profit for 100 shows is not even ambitious anymore.
Vince & co., like in 1983 or 1995 are evolving with the changing consumer landscape, and I think they are trying to orient their product towards a subscription service-based revenue model. And, like buying up cable time, debuting Wrestlemania, or abandoning their family-family roots in the Attitude Era, changing so drastically how the entire industry has run for over 3 decades is a massive gamble. Think about WCW's televised approach: they leased a studio for several years and did most of their production on set. They frequently gave away tickets, didn't care much about live gates for their PPV's and basically created a "television-first" model which was just about as revolutionary as Vince's Wrestlemania or cable TV ideas. It took the known model for the entire business--touring around small, dimly-lit arenas at great cost to performers and the company, with little profit to be shown--and virtually turned it on its head. It proved to be amazing at creating the pop culture buzz around wrestling that was lacking for over a decade. Who knows how this latest evolution will turn out.