The sorry state of streaming residuals shows why SAG and the WGA are striking.
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.
As someone in America I’m not undervalued, underpaid, or starving. Maybe you should stick to speaking for your own industry.
“I’m not struggling so therefore no one else is struggling”
Are you for fucking real?
That’s exactly the myopic thinking that put us in this situation, so you shouldn’t be surprised to find this person.
Read the first comment though… it suggested that literally everyone is struggling
“Um actually 🤓 ☝️”
Have some sense to not post something like this when you are aware of the plight of the average worker in America even if you are in the minority as a tech worker
(I’m also a tech worker)
Engineer here - we’re undervalued too. We just happen to have more clout in the workplace at the moment, and so more individual bargaining power. That can change on a dime, though.
It’s also just relative scaling. A Starbucks barista might make $40k/year while its CEO Laxman Narasimhan makes $15M/year. Meanwhile, a Google engineer might make $400k/year, but its CEO Sundar Pichai makes $225M/year. So while an engineer will earn way more than a barista, as a fraction of CEO pay, engineers often actually make less. Both are symptoms of worker exploitation. It just so happens that technology companies tend to make a lot more money than coffee companies.
If that changes I’ll figure out the new way. Wouldn’t be the first time, don’t figure it’s gonna be the last.
I don’t really have issues there, either. I actually get in hot water if I don’t take at least 6 weeks of PTO a year, and the maximum is unlimited so long as my work gets done.
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.
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.”
Thanks for sharing this story. That TV host sounds like an unbelievable asshole, no wonder it stuck with your friend for so long. I can’t fathom what would make a person act like that.
But just like with Netflix, you have alternatives. Either pirate, or use services that pay the artists a little more, like tidal.
I use tidal, and I must say the only thing they are missing is transferring currently listening music to another device.
Podcasts I don’t really care about.
Apart from that, pretty good alternative. And I feel better knowing that I am supporting the artists.
Fwiw, the title is intentionally skewed and wrong. I’m not saying writers shouldn’t be upset because they should, but it is making the situation look much worse than it is.
The six original writers were paid $3K each in streaming residuals last quarter for Season 1.
Suits was added to Netflix on June 17th where it streamed for three billion minutes in a single week, June 26 to July 2. Using Nielsen numbers, it streamed for about five billion minutes on Netflix during Q2. Previously it was on Peacock and we don’t have the streaming data for that, but we can assume that it wasn’t anywhere as much. Using the most recent data through July 16, it was seen for a total of 12.8 billion minutes.
Streaming services also doesn’t pay residuals based on minutes watched, but based on a complicated formula.
Suits episodes are 42 minutes long, meaning the base annual residual is $10,034. Netflix US has more than 150M subscribers, so the subscriber factor is 150%. Their initial streaming residual payment would be $15K per episode.
However, that is just the initial payment Netflix needs to make. Subsequent payments for the actual streaming rights per year are adjusted down. This is the first year on Netflix so the residual factor is 45%. This makes the base annual payment $7,448.
Now, the show was on Netflix for 14 days during the last quarter, making their Q2 residual $286. WGA also imposes a 1.5% union due plus $25 per quarter. This brings the payment per episode down to $256.
Considering how few of the episodes they wrote, this seems almost reasonable. It would be a better comparison of we could see how much they make compared to TV reruns or home media sales.
So about $40k shared among all writers seem almost reasonable had they written all of them, and we keep the same ratio…?
6k per person for a full season on a really popular hit show seems absurdly low
But we’re not talking about salary here. We’re talking residuals, per quarter, paid on top of the salary they received for the original work.
For a show that is 13 years old. Collecting $6k per quarter for work you did 13 years ago and that you have to do absolutely nothing for anymore seems pretty good to me?
There’s a hell of a lot of working class people who would absolutely love to be getting paid like that. Trying to frame this as the working class vs the rich seems really dishonest. Do TV writers even understand what the working class is, or how much we make? I sure as hell don’t collect $6k per quarter for work I did 13 years ago. If I did, I’d be rich.
Not that I’m trying to still for the corpo here, but this is a per quarter payment. ~$270 per episode from this single quarter just based on viewers from 2 streaming services. We don’t know how much they’ve got paid in aggregate for this single episode.
Presumably they got something upfront/hourly initially and they’ve been paid residuals for many years, as they did the work in 2011 and episodes have been rerun alot on network tv.
Idk how much is reasonable for the work they did do but it’s certainly been alot more than this small payment.
I’m a former musician and record label employee who’s been screaming “told you so” for years.
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
I don’t get any money from the systems I setup at work as an IT worker years ago, even if they are used every day in perpetuity and make the company billions.
Where’s my income in perpetuity for creative problem solving?
It should be in your bank account instead of the pockets of investors that do 0 work and generate 0 value
If investors do 0 work and generate 0 value, why are they included at all?
Writers and actors should cut out investors and make their content independently. If they need money, they could borrow some under the condition that they share the profits if their content makes money. Wait a second…
Ok… but then why would they pay to have it done in the first place?
I’ve solved issues that have saved transit riders hundreds of thousands of hours of time… but so have other people. I don’t know how such an accounting of the return for investment I made would work.
When my solutions stop working as well, due to misc design/need drift, how do we decide how much I lose and the next me gets?.
This just in: different payment structures are different. Different valuation of output is different. Unfair under-valuations are unfair. What a discovery.
Did you not get paid hourly or salary for the work? Your compensation package was different. Did you not have a steady job? Did you not know you were going in there next week?
I think the latent question here is - how were expectations and/or contracts for writers any different from hourly workers who have never expected royalties?
Did you not get paid hourly or salary for the work?
Writing as a profession gets this too in many scenarios.
Your compensation package was different.
Almost everyone’s is. It’s all based on what you can convince people to pay you and the real winners are the ones who are friends and family of the ownership and/or executives, always.
Did you not have a steady job?
Can good writers not land steady jobs? Of course they can! Have I always had a steady job? Of course not!
Did you not know you were going in there next week?
I have had many roles in IT that you never know when something can or would happen to terminate employment. I’ve had an entire department let go so they could shift the work to another group. I’ve had acquisitions happen where getting a pitiful severance is commonplace (and severance only ever comes when you give up all rights to sue anyone at all ever who worked for said entity giving you said pittance. You’re paid for your SILENCE.) I’ve seen MANY contract roles where a hiring manager on a whim can choose to terminate employment and you’re left holding the bag. As an employee you NEVER know if you’re going in there next week, you just hope that you are. After all, you are an employee at-will. This is most roles as very few have duration contracts overall.
I wish IT workers would unionize and demand better pay - but then outsourcing would be even more prevalent than it is. Show business isn’t known for meritocracy in high paying roles anyway.
Paying people in perpetuity for doing one role for a small period of time is aligned with permanent ownership and dividends of something. Why writers wouldn’t just ask for stock or buy stock with earnings like everybody else is puzzling. There are so many stories about abuse with contract negotiation by people at all levels of showbusiness that i’d argue the whole thing should be overhauled but any disruption causes some to win and some to lose… and we couldn’t have anyone brought down to the same level of anyone else, could we? Let’s just keep those executive pay and bonus structures the same as they’ve always been too while we’re at it, wouldn’t want to stop their meteoric rise in wage y/y while the rest of us get boned.
Did you take your job at a rate of pay based on getting paid residuals in perpetuity?
This is like you taking a contract where they continue to pay you a licence fee for each server that they use your product on, then they move the product to a cloud system so they can get the output of 100 servers with only a single server licence.
If they have a contract to receive payment perpetually why are they striking instead of litigating?
I think I can see where you are coming from here. The difference between your creativity and writers, actors, musicians is that while your work is used by the company you built the system for that company isn’t selling it to someone else. You built infrastructure.
Writers, actors, and musicians work is being sold by the companies they work for as a revenue stream.
The platform that IT Engineers created for netflix is being sold by the companies they work for as a revenue stream.
See what I did there? Your argument is that they are more important but in reality they are replaceable like everyone is. Most of the writers out there aren’t in high paying GRRMartin level roles, they’re writing episodes of sitcoms and reality TV. The quality is all over the place.
Honestly.
I don’t understand why people are so up in arms around artists and the entertainment industry. Flat payment is commonplace in most industries. These people agreed to the payment they were given.
You basically agree to it with a knife in your back because it is the only deal available and they’re using the money and power against your desire to be heard or seen.
Better they uploaded it on torrent and asked for donations
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.
There’s a donation fund to help the strike continue. The writers aren’t calling for a boycott yet.
https://mashable.com/article/how-to-support-wga-writer-strike
Actually boycotting ironically hurts in this situation.
Writers and actors are encouraging people to keep watching and taking about shows & movies because that underscores the value they bring and are trying to get recognition for, ultimately bolstering their case.
Keep watching anything and everything folks!
