As someone who works in the film and TV industry, let me go ahead and say whatever you do in America, whatever industry: you're undervalued, underpaid, and your wealthy executives are getting fat on your hard work while you starve.
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
1745 points (98.5% liked)
News
23361 readers
3233 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Doing some math:
The writers that were paid $3000 in the story wrote 11/134 episodes or 8.2%
The episodes are 42 minutes each, round down 2 minutes for skipped credits, divide 3x10^9 by 40 we get:
75 million episodes streamed (approx)
If they wrote 8.2 % of those streamed, then they wrote 6.15 million individually streamed episodes.
So writers got 0.049c per episode streamed or 0.00012c per minute streamed.
The average American watches 160 minutes of TV Video a day, so round that up to 5000 minutes a month, and say $10 a month per sub on that, we get $10 of revenue for 5000 minutes streamed, or 0.2c per minute.
So streaming revenue (using the above math and assumptions) would be 0.2c per minute of which the writers of the content that was streamed got 0.00012c or 0.06%.
Netflix 2023Q2 revenue was 8.18B and expenses were 6.36B.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/revenue
2018 estimate figures the combined Netflix users streamed 164M hours per day
https://www.soda.com/news/netflix-users-stream-164-million-hours-per-day/
14.9Billion hours for that Quarter.
2018 saw 15.8 Billion annual revenue and 14.2Billion in costs. Gives us an estimate of 3.55B in costs for 1 quarter in 2018
894B minutes / 3.55 B in costs = 0.397c in costs per minute streamed.
Out of the 0.397c of costs (0.442c revenue) writers got 0.00012c or 0.0302% of the costs or 0.0272% of the revenue.
/c/theydidthemath
similar numbers to Spotify, but sadly there's no musicians union
I had a friend who was in a musicians union back in the 40s and 50s. Funny thing, I had a dream about him last night and I would’ve forgotten completely had you not made this comment.
He told me a story once. The union got him a gig on television. He was so stoked about it.
He lost half of his thumb in WWII and was very self conscious about it. The host of the show noticed the black cap he used to cover his thumb and asked him about it. He kindly asked the host to avoid making a thing of it and ask that the cameraman avoid shooting it up close.
He stepped out on the stage and the host said, “ladies and gentlemen, here’s Buddy, the thumbless wonder.”
Years and years later that still bothered him. He’s been dead and gone a long time now. He was an awesome dude who ran a guitar shop. His wife left him because he kept giving instruments away and she wanted a better financial future. I used to go to his shop to get strings and half the time he’d say, “They’re on the house buddy. I’ll be dead before they’ll get what I owe ‘em.”
load more comments
(4 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(7 replies)
Better they uploaded it on torrent and asked for donations
I'm a former musician and record label employee who's been screaming "told you so" for years. I stopped paying attention to the pittance I get in streaming revenue because it impacts my life that little.
I hope the writers get what they're owed, but don't hold your fucking breath
I don’t understand how streaming isn’t just considered syndication. It seems like a dictionary definition of what it was, even if it didn’t exist when syndication agreements were made.
It’s a rerun of a show on a separate channel/platform. And the writers/actors should get the agreed revenue for it the same as if it were on TMC, nick at night or Netflix b
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(44 replies)
You should support the actor's and writer's strike. That's what I'll keep bringing up here, do what you can to make things change.
I have been supporting it. I haven't starred in a single Holywood movie since it began and I haven't written shit.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(8 replies)
When are people going to understand that what you know, what you can do, value, truth, integrity and love have absolutely nothing to do with how much you get paid? The world makes much more sense if you stop assuming being a good person makes you rich. The opposite is true, being a psychopath is far more profitable.
If we placed the appropriate value on the people who reduced suffering the most, there would be statues of Edward Jenner everywhere and he would have been the richest person in the world.
There is an inverse relation between the wage a job pays and the contribution to society that the job makes, with a few exceptions like doctors. The highest paying jobs are very often parasites on society. This seems to originate from the Calvinist work ethic where meaningful work is its own reward.
~ paraphrased from David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
"It's Free Money" ~ Studio Executives
Gross. Writers should be paid fairly.*
Edit: Previously read "Shame on Neflix". See thoughtful reply below.
While I don’t disagree with the general state, I don’t see how it’s Netflix. They didn’t produce or create Suits, nor were the initial broadcaster, so the contracts were set long before Netflix
How streaming doesn't count as broadcasting is a tad too convenient for the studio to not be a deliberate loophole. Even when the language is tested in court the lobbyism favors the deep pockets asking to split hairs clearly in bad faith.
load more comments
(2 replies)
What a weird measure of time for a show. It's not a song. Why not use something more suitable, like views?
Edit: it's 50 million hours. If each episode is about an hour long, then that's about 50 million views. If there are 10 episodes per season, then that's 5 million viewers per season.
It’s semantics, but the equivalent for a song would be plays. I think the problem with using views or plays for a metric like this is that they don’t account for people that take in the entire piece of media. It considers people that accidentally click an episode and then close it after some seconds, and people who watch an episode from start to finish, to be the same. One of those people are going to see a lot more ads than the other, thus making the company more money. Just my hypothesis tho.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
If all content (all content) was paid for by tax dollars, it would not only be ad free, but there wouldn't be huge companies standing in-between the artist and the consumer as far as getting the artists paid. And it wouldn't cost that much. Like less than what you pay for having all streaming services simultaneously.
But imagine the controversy a government would receive broadcasting various kinds of content. People deride the BBC as a mouthpiece of whichever party is in power despite immense work making it as impartial as possible
Some years ago the BBC itself ordered a study by Nottingham University which did show that the BBC consistently was pro-whatever-party-was-in-Government, so not being pro a specific party but switching from one of the parties of the power duopoly in Britain to the other as they alternated in Government (funnilly enough giving very little airtime to the smaller leftwing-ecologist party and tons of airtime to smaller far-right parties like UKIP).
However that's about the News, not the rest.
Mind you the BBC also does in it's contents invariably beautify the view about certain slices of British Society and British History but that's the same as the 100% private content producers in the US also do, so it doesn't seem to be an explicitly "Public TV" thing.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
load more comments
(8 replies)
view more: next ›