The bump in subscribers for the Rumble had to have been bigger than the number of people who actually unsubbed because they didn't like the current direction. Twitter may have been up in arms, but a lot of those hash taggers still wanted to see Sami Zayn on Wednesday or were just stirring the pot.
Also, the recent move to month-to-month means that a lot of people who might previously have balked at the six month commitment would now join, and Rumble would be a good reason to jump in now if they hadn't in November for the free Survivor Series.
With a free February, that will increase "subscribers" even though it won't create a higher net income for the month, but then at least half of those people who "just want to check it out" will forget to unsub before March, and even after some of them realize it they'll think "well, I guess I might as well stick around for Mania in April" and a good portion of them will not unsub in the near future.
Plus they're expanding international markets, so it's not like the Raw rating alone is enough to judge subscribership, and when you are saying "3 million people watch RAW" are you going by overnights, L+24 DVR, L+72? In this day and age, capturing only the people watching a live airing is not representing your entire fan base.
With the subscriber set-up, eventually you end up in a gym membership scenario, where half or more of the people paying you aren't even actively using your services. They can ride out a sub all the way through the credit card expiration (and I think some of those monthly things don't even require updating CC info as long as the CC number stays the same).
One million wrestling fans may seem like a crazy number, but just for comparison sake there are still something like 8 million people paying for World of Warcraft each month, down from a peak of 11 million around 5 years ago but still going strong 10 years after the initial launch. Is the WoW crowd that much bigger than the wrestling crowd? I doubt it. There's still a lot of potential for mining memberships.
