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.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone's paid shit these days it seems. I feel like teachers/healthcare workers/IT people need more raises too. Idk why we're so focused on just writers...plenty more important people out there getting shit pay... especially teachers in America who have to deal with so much bullshit.
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.