'Suits' Was Streamed For 3 Billion Minutes on Netflix and the Writers Were Collectively Paid $3,000
'Suits' Was Streamed For 3 Billion Minutes on Netflix and the Writers Were Collectively Paid $3,000
The sorry state of streaming residuals shows why SAG and the WGA are striking.
The sorry state of streaming residuals shows why SAG and the WGA are striking.
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.
Better they uploaded it on torrent and asked for donations
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.
"It's Free Money" ~ Studio Executives
It's so absurd that some professions are so devalued, at least in certain timelines in history. Scribes are now considered practically worthless, though in ancient times they held high degrees of respect as scholars.
Now it's middlemen who writers with projects who take the lion's share of the money, despite accomplishing little else. They have no inherent skills beyond connecting person A with person B.
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.
So I've got mixed feelings on this. First off I'll start by saying the execs at Netflix, like execs in general, are vastly overpaid, and there's definitely room to cut from there to spend elsewhere. The thing I have trouble with is reconciling the streaming model of paying a fixed $XX a month for unlimited watching with paying out residuals. Residuals easily work out when you've got sales of items like tickets or DVDs/blu-rays or broadcast licensing to play at specific times where you can split up the fractions and work out who gets what ahead of time. With streaming, however, you can watch an unlimited amount. So does that mean they take the total time watched of all shows/movies and divide the $XX a month among those based on licensing agreements? How do you determine what gets a bigger cut?
It's kinda like how moviepass failed when they let you watch unlimited movies at the theater. In that case they were covering the cost of individual tickets and also physical theaters are much more expensive to run, but still there are issues with the "all you can watch" model. Another major issue is that there is so much content out there. Heck, most entertainment I get these days is from "free" youtube videos. You're going to get a lot less in residuals when you're competing with so many other sources of content. Execs and other higher-ups always got a disproportionately large amount of the pie, but on top of that, the pie is distributed among many more sources of entertainment.
Assuming the current all you can watch flat fee model is unsustainable, how do you think a model like videogame (Steam, Epic, etc..) would be perceived? Lower monthly sub. Originals are included. Wanna watch something else? You can watch 2 episodes to start. If you wanna continue buy the season. Sort of like videogames where there are demos.
and no royalties? $3000, would be few, even for only one professional writer.
IP Laws need to change: Melancholy Elephants is a great Hugo Award winning short story about this train of thought.
What led to these extremes. okams razer suggests that they just kept on low balling, luring in desperate dreamers who hoped to make it big and move on from scrap work until it all funneled into this? there has to be more to it? id say hollywood couldn't be so vain but then again, they never did find out who killed the lead from hogans hero now did they?
You licking boots or not? It's correct information but sounds like you're defending it.
Warning: unpopular opinion here.
From the article:
That means that despite the show being a resurgent hit, there were no big secondary payouts.
So, I am an engineer/scientist. Products that I have developed/contributed to development are used by billions of people. Most likely you, the reader of this comment are using it right now, because some of the products I worked on are telecom products, that are widely used to transfer information.
The amount of secondary payouts I receive is EXACTLY ZERO.
My honest question is, why those writers should be any different? They should be paid when they make their products, according to the contract they signed. But why many think they entitled to something more?
And no, I do not think that argument "but it is difficult work, it is not constant" works here. There are lots of difficult, non-constant, seasonal, whatever jobs there that pay even less.