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.
You spelled capitalism wrong. Social market economy makes it a bit better - but yeah earnings through work and capital gains are extremely off balance right now.
As someone in America I’m not undervalued, underpaid, or starving. Maybe you should stick to speaking for your own industry.
Keep licking that boot.
I don’t have to, I can afford my own
The attitude of “fuck them, I got mine” is a good way to get people to hate you. I hope you’re okay with that.
🤭 it’s funny because in my history of working in engineering, the guy (rarely gal) with this attitude is consistently the least effective or useful. I presume the same applies here, based on a number of factors you’ve politely lain before us all.
Found the executive
“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.
The thing is, he doesnt necessarily earn a decent wage…thats the real kicker.
Read the first comment though… it suggested that literally everyone is struggling
I only said people are starving because some are, and it’s avoidable. But everyone in America is grossly underpaid compared to executive pay and corporate wealth.
It’s fucking hyperbole. Obviously not literally everyone is underpaid (such as but not limited to CEOs). Like, if ya make a comment like what I responded to it comes off as a snarky and you will get shit on for it.
Ok but you attacked someone for saying that they personally aren’t suffering, even though they weren’t suggesting they speak for everyone either… unlike the other comment
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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.
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“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)
Honestly even tech workers are not paid enough relative to executives. Shit is crazy out here.
And then lawyers be making like $1mil a year.
And here we have the typical “Fuck you, I got mine” attitude. How lovely.
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If your CEO has money, you’re probably undervalued and underpaid. It’s how the incentive structure works.
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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.
What do you mean by the new way?
Found the CEO…
Hahaha, 😅 uhh you most certainly are, buddy! Hate to burst your bubble and bring you back down to reality… I know you hate it when we take the binkiboot out of your mouth to let your breath for a second, but you got to give it up eventually… you’re too old for that now…
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.
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I am not that guy, but this is not how science work. Science and engineering are the product, and scientists and engineers do it as writers do it…
They are absolutely comparable.
Actors would be a stretched comparison, but writers… It’s a pretty good one
I am not that guy, but this is not how science work. Science and engineering are the product, and scientists and engineers do it as writers do it…
They are absolutely comparable
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A lot of people kwows how to write. Less people know how to use autocad.
As said it looks like you don’t have a clear idea how science and engineering work.
“Someone else’s idea” is the idea of scientists and engineers. They are the people who have the ideas, design products and implement ideas. Products are created by them. There is no suit who come up with ideas, and you cannot replace scientists and engineers with suits. Considering them as easily replaceable is the way companies fail. This is the reason their contracts come with more perks and benefits than other positions. You could compare them to writers, directors and crew members in a movie. What science and tech are missing are actors. The 2 guys you mentioned are more comparable to actors than writers.
That said, scientist and engineers deserve a piece of long term profits of the products they contributed creating, similarly as writers. Unfortunately they don’t have strong unions as writers… But they should
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Well what jobs are you thinking about?
- farmhand fits your description, but they pay less because they don’t need skilled workers, anybody with a working body can do it. Can’t just drag in a random guy to do your writing, acting, or VFX.
“unskilled labour” is a myth.
How so?
You should also be paid more, you have been instrumental in creating billions in wealth for people who cannot do what you can do, you should get more.
It’s because of people like you that scientists get treated like crap. You also deserve to get paid for the things you create.
Like others have said, this is the wrong mentality. Instead of asking “why should they get it when I don’t?”, You should simply be asking “why don’t I get it?”
Turning us against each other is how the ruling elite stay in power. 💪
This is the right answer! I agree that this is the point
What’s he’s saying is those ruling class shouldn’t be getting it either because it’s a silly concept lol.
Road crews don’t get paid from tolls. Power plants don’t get paid beaucoup. Etc. Etc.
The root issue is the company profiting endlessly or simply not paying appropriate wages. IP law absolutely needs to change.
Melancholy Elephants is a great Hugo Award winning short story about this train of thought.
I think you’re missing a detail here, which is that before streaming was a thing writers would make significant amounts of their money by getting a show syndicated on a network, that was the whole deal. Streaming is being treated differently, effectively resulting in then receiving a very large pay cut because even if they make a successful show the payout doesn’t come.
And it’s true they could structure things so that they don’t receive a secondary payout, but their base salary was negotiated with that later payout in mind. You and I don’t receive secondary payouts for our work, but our salary is also adjusted to recognize that.
As the other poster stated, you get what you negotiate for. If you don’t negotiate for those secondary payments then you don’t get them. It’s right to argue when it’s “right or wrong” for those payments but you can argue whether it’s fair.
The corporations take on the risk but when it pays the payout isn’t fairly distributed. It unfairly goes to the top players who didn’t take any risk on because they are seperate from the corporation.
Also just because you don’t get any doesn’t mean nobody else should. You can try and negotiate that with your employer if you want. If you keep that mentality then you’re only bringing everyone else down to your level. We should be elevating each other. That mentality is just jealousy and it will keep you where you are.
Sure, but when the risks the capital takes are so low & long-term as in showbusiness (everything got consolidated af), and the payouts so huge compared to cost (especially excluding like top 5 most payed ppl on the project) … you might think that the negotiations weren’t made fairly on equal grounds.
Otherwise, if there were meaningful risks, the corps would have no problem sharing (=lowering) that risk at least with immediate stakeholders/workers. I bet most writers would take minimal or no pay to get in on the profits (that can last decades). Most writers work on several projects a year so so if business risks would be actually important, lowering them via lower initial costs for shared uncertain future profits would be a win-win scenario.
You get what you demand, and what you bargain for, which is why they are now on strike. You valued your knowledge, experience, and expertise in telcom, in different ways, and less over the long term, than workers in the entertainment industry, who, for the majority of the entertainment industry’s existence, have been taken advantage of by the producers of that entertainment. You decided to work for a salary and benefits, and got yours upfront, their industry works a different way as a result of historically predatory entertainment industry practices.
Who is getting money from your work? Do they deserve it? More than you?
Having the good fortune to have money earlier shouldn’t entitle someone to more money later. Investors are important, but shouldn’t be allowed to have all of the benefit.
Crab in a bucket mentality.
“I don’t receive residuals, so why should these writers? The executives are entitled to all the profit.”
If all us engineers got paid every time our code was used, the Internet as it exists would be absurdly expensive. Really, it couldn’t exist. Thank god engineers don’t have the same “I need to be paid every time something I created is used by anybody” mentality. You’re building on the work of millions of people before you, you owe it to others to contribute (and make a living in the process).
Of course, the industries are different in important ways. But you should be able to explain the differences, not just wave them away with “ur just jelly lol”
IMHO, copyright and IP law is ridiculously protective. People should get a few years to benefit from their creations, then they should be public domain. This lifetime-plus-70-years bullshit is stupid. Companies are exploiting those stupid laws to milk us on every platform for decades with each media artifact, and artists and writers just want to get a cut of the action. IMHO, it’s the wrong fight, and I can’t really support them in it: “give writers a share of the rent you milk from us” is not a cause I wanna get behind.
Copyright law is ridiculously protective. You can thank Disney, the corporation, for that. The original law said 30 years. That was enough for the creator to make a career being creative. Micky would look a whole lot different by this point.
Why shouldn’t we, as engineers, be entitled to a small percentage of the profits that are generated by our code? Why are the shareholders entitled to it instead?
I worked in Hollywood before becoming a programmer, and even as a low level worker, IATSE still got residuals from union shows that went to our healthcare and pension funds. My healthcare was 100% covered by that fund for a top-of-the-line plan, and I got contributions to both a pension AND a 401K that were ON TOP of my base pay rather than deducted from it.
Lastly, we were paid hourly, which means overtime, but also had a weekly minimum. Mine was 50 hours. So if I was asked to work at all during a week I was entitled to 50 hours of pay unless I chose to take days off myself.
Unions fucking rock and software engineers work in a field that is making historic profits off of our labor. We deserve a piece of that.
I guess it depends right? If a show or movie or other piece of art continues to bring income in, where does that money go? Particularly when the team that created it have effected disbanded and therefore aren’t technically on the same payroll that income is arriving on. I would argue it should not solely go to the owners of that production house.
Residuals makes sense in a way that doesn’t really apply to engineering because typically engineers will remain at a company and their continued employment is how they continue to gain income from their work.
You could maybe say an actual equivalent would be engineers getting shares in their company, which would function the same as residuals. I think that is a more apt comparison.
I think the shares in a company thing is a good comparison, because I went to university at a place that churns out a lot of grads who found or work for startups. It’s a minefield because often the reason early employees get paid in partly in shares is because they couldn’t afford to pay them the “true amount” upfront.
But the sales and marketing morons deserve to be paid for everything, of course!
No, they shouldn’t be profiting from rent on IP any more than anybody else does. The government should make some major changes to intellectual property law to stop that.
Anyway…do sales & marketing people get paid an unreasonable amount? Are they rolling in cash while writers suffer? Seems to me that most the marketing people I’ve met in my life were just getting along like everybody else. They don’t seem like the right people to be angry at.
You worked in a shitty industry, I’m in the valley and the marketing guys make top bank, I was a Sr principal at one of the biggies and they blow me out of the water.
Sales is often on a different level, commission is incredible.
Where do you think the money is going?
I was reading a book on this recently and it had a good reason for why some departments get all the money and some don’t. Imagine you have a market that is saturated with products, you decided you can and want to buy, but can’t choose. In that case, sales/marketing is what brings in the most money, so they have the most power and get paid accordingly.
Now imagine the post-war booming economy where every car made gets sold and cars are fairly established as a product. Sales and engineering performance are not that important, but financial departments grew immensely, because the competition was on optimizing, cost-cutting, investment and consolidation.
Last example: new industry, still figuring out the best methods, newest products and killer apps: engineering has the most power.
Given the economy we’re in right now, where money is tight, new products outside the AI hype/boom are going to be companies fighting to sell you their product, so marketing is winning right now, but it may change.
Easier answer: social skills + their whole job is ass-kissing, they get very good at it.
Imagine how good engineers could be if they didn’t have to waste all their time doing actual work.
The estimated total pay for a Marketing Executive at Walt Disney Company is $106,208 per year.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Walt-Disney-Company-Marketing-Executive-Salaries-E717_D_KO20,39.htm
The estimated total pay for a Writer at Walt Disney Company is $69,619 per year. This number represents the median, which is the midpoint of the ranges
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Walt-Disney-Company-Writer-Salaries-E717_D_KO20,26.htm
Disney pays higher than average. Writers can get paid a hell of a lot less. And it’s often only a part-time job that lasts only a few weeks or months a year.
So yeah, I’d say the marketing executives get paid an unreasonable amount compared to the writers who actually make a huge contribution to creating the product.
Not very smart for an engineer
You don’t have to be smart to be an engineer. Just resourceful.
Yep. My team is composed of brilliant engineers who lack common sense, and average engineers who might not have a deep level of mastery who keep them in check. It’s a working system.
I work in machining. The amount of drawing I’ve received from engineers that could not be machined makes me question the intelligence required to become an engineer.
I’m an engineer that makes those drawings and I can’t dispute this at all.
I used to be a mechanic and I agree as well.
I don’t have an answer but I don’t necessarily agree either. However I updooted because it’s interesting discussion and you were nice about it.
You , I like your positive attitude
Ooh boy you’re gonna get the “anyone rich is evil give me free stuff because you have more” mob all animated.
But you’re right. They have a contracted rate to do a job (good or bad, fair or not). It makes for a flashy headline to say “look what the downstream revenue was”.
Only 14% of SAG members made enough money this year to get health insurance. Similar is true for the WGA. The low income economy that industry is fueled by only ever worked because of the residual system.
Okay you weren’t picked for any shows the past three months but that’s okay because your residuals cover rent and health insurance.
Not anymore, because the streamers refuse to pay residuals.
You couldn’t make a less informed comment about this affair if you tried, really. There was an existing system, companies took advantage of a loophole in that system to profit more and give execs massive pay days whilst giving the people who did all the work nothing, and now the people who did all the work are refusing to work until they get paid again.
I don’t know what people like you are hoping to achieve here other than demonstrate a profound level of dumbassary.
Instead of making up a scenario in your head and then getting riled up over it, why don’t you read the level headed and educated responses that have been written?
Bootlicker spotted…
Don’t ask why they should be getting pay pay outs… Ask why you aren’t!
Writers don’t get paid engineer salaries.
My honest question is, why those writers should be any different?
So I am also an engineer. Products that I have developed/contributed to development are used by millions of people. (I’m being a bit cheeky here by copying you, but this is true of me too.)
The compensation packages of engineers are wildly different than that of writers because our jobs are steady.
The compensation structure of writers is designed to carry them between shows when they are not making any money. They also need excess cash to fund retirement savings, insurance, and other benefits because they are unemployed for long and unpredictable stretches.
The residuals system was designed to address this very specific structure of the writing profession. As engineers, we don’t have these wildly unsteady employment schedules, so the residuals system is not warranted in our profession.
Your experience as an engineer/scientist is valid, but you have to understand how wildly different writing is as a career path, and how compensation packages are different out of necessity.
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.
Sure, industries like retail, tourism, and food service have similar weaknesses, but those industries are unskilled. Writing is highly skilled labor. WGA members are responsible for writing the most valuable media on the planet, American film and television.
The distinction between writing and these other industries can be measured in dollars.
Sure, industries like retail, tourism, and food service have similar weaknesses, but those industries are unskilled.
I understand what you are trying to say, but no they really aren’t. They require a very different skill set than being an engineer or a doctor, but I guarantee that you do not have the skills that I do with knives, playing with fire, and making knives. I know this because an engineer doesn’t have the time to spend 20 years working as a cook/chef, and 2 as an apprentice blacksmith. That being said, I’m useless if you hand me math above pre-calculus. I can remember algebra and pre-calc, but I don’t remember calculus any more.
There’s no job that is “easy.” In all actuality the lower the pay, the harder the job is to do. There are very few exceptions to this rule.
I took hard jobs because I’m a pyromaniac and so I made that work for me. Cooking and blacksmithing are just playing with fire.
Smithing is definitely skilled labor. It’s the classic example of an artisan.
But work in most of the food service industry (front and back) is unskilled. And by “most” I mean things like fast food, cafeterias, diners, chain restaurants etc. In all of these cases, you can hire Joe Shmoe off the street to wait tables.
Fine dining is a special case. Obviously you need significant skill/training to be the chef at a Michelin star restaurant, for example.
And I’m not saying that unskilled labor is easy. It’s not. I spent a decade in food service as an unskilled laborer (mostly fast food and cafeterias). It’s exhausting and difficult. And I’m not saying that unskilled labor is undeserving of a living wage. What I am saying is that the labor pool for unskilled work is much much larger, so it’s near impossible for that kind of worker to demand residuals or equity in the same way as an engineer or screen writer.
They could if they unionized more probably.
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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.
You’re an employee, actors are (generally) independent contractors so the comparison breaks down. Most people who don’t understand the situation have been making this comparison.
The closer analogy for you would be if you, as an independent engineer, created a library that Oracle licensed instead of bought. Something they are bundling into their latest database server.
Should you, as a developer, take less per unit because Oracle starts selling through a new channel? Say the Windows app store instead of through their website directly?
I mean, it’s ok if you feel like that’s ok but I don’t think most people would agree with you when they really understand what’s going on.
The unions gave the studios a sweetheart deal in the infancy of streaming so that it wouldn’t smother in the crib. Now that it’s profitable, don’t the artists and writers deserve the same level of compensation for streaming as they get through other channels? Not more, just the same.
I’m an engineer too.
You’re an idiot, we should get paid more, the money goes to the moron marketing druids, not the ones who actually make/patent things like us.
You don’t seem smart enough to be a very good engineer, but then again you typed this almost certainly using tech I worked on.
Engineers are absolutely the shittest negotiators. They bring so much fucking value and are happy to get a mug and a pat on the back for inventing something that makes a company millions. Compare that to sales where often the top performer can make close to the CEOs pay.
Do you get stock RSU, Stock options, or other in incentive for general success? For writers residuals are more directly tied to their work. And there’s a bit of a difference in terms of residuals being understood as part of the upfront contract risk/reward.
Bcs taking someone’s work & capitalize on it just because the original worker didn’t have the means to do so … some people might see as immoral in a lot of cases.
One of the cornerstones of capitalism tho.
Also note the huge difference scales, bcs it matters a lot: if you sell a peace of tech, or business, or property at fair price (like dcf or whatever), then you already got compensated justly or as close to that as possible with the information available at the time. But if you were forced to sell at an arbitrary fixed rate bcs the buyer forced you into it from their position of power over you (and made a huge profit in a short amount of time from that) … you might feel different about the situation.
Like, even your, if you would be able to get secondly payouts, would you not collect them?
Also, if the negotiations & payout would be fair, the strike would not make financial sense for any party, or have an effect on the business.
Another counter argument:
Residuals are analogous to equity in the tech industry.
You almost certainly received part of your compensation as stock or stock options. You can hold onto your shares and receive dividends long after you have left the company you contributed to.
Residuals are like equity in a movie or film, rather than a company.
I worked on products that many Lemmy users are using to read and post. I don’t expect residuals because that’s not how my industry was built / ever worked.
Writers are in an industry that previously paid them every time their work made money. That’s the difference.
“It’s Free Money” ~ Studio Executives
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.
The writers are on strike at the moment. It’s really weird that you don’t think that’s of interest.
Because I put things in tiers of importance in my head and theres jobs that rank wayyyyy above writers that need our rally cry way more in my opinion.
De-valuaing others de-values yourself. Divided we beg for pittances from employers and the owners.
You know what you’re right. Thanks for the insight. I apologize for that comment.
I forgive you. I also appreciate your sense of self-reflection.
If writers get a rise, that is an argument for others to also get one. It is much easier for the 0 1% to whack one profesion then to play whackamole with everyone.
Moles unite! Together we can resist harder whacks!
Well put.
Solidarity, a rising tide floats all boats. The enemy is not at your side.
Now do musicians!
You can do any profession on which a company make long term profits on employees’ or freelances’ work. Such as science, programming, business development, etc. Amount of residuals paid is zero ($0.- gross).
Media company want to treat writers and actors as any freelance. The issue is that freelances and employees deserve residuals as actors and writers, but it won’t happen. It is easier to remove existing benefits labeling them as “privileges”, than give more benefits to all
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.
Netflix got 3 billion from one show, plenty sustainable to me.
Yes, I agree with you. I’m saying assuming. I don’t think they’ll go… You know what? You’re right… We’re gonna start paying more. Something will have to give. I’m saying is there a diff business model?
3,000,000,000 * $15 (assumed Netflix plan/user) = $45,000,000,000
Damn! Just for one show?!
You know Netflix doesn’t work that way right?
enlighten me
If those 3 billion minutes were watched non-stop 24/7 for the paying subscribers it would make at least $486,111.11 for Netflix assuming the subscribers paid for the cheapest subscription at ~$7. That’s still a lot of money, but they also pay for their own upkeep, servers and much more.
I know most people don’t have the cheapest subscription, and also that they don’t watch 24/7. But it puts into perspective that Netflix doesn’t earn that much on one series.
To add: they also make their own shows and productions and they pay to put shows up on their service that are not their own productions. I don’t know what a show like suits will cost to be put on Netflix, since they don’t produce the show, but I’d imagine that’s not cheap. And I guess the writers get a percentage of the money earned on the selling of those rights (depending on the contract they have with the original studio)
And the paying of the writers is in the hands of the studio selling the rights, not Netflix.
You said they got 3 billion as if they got 3 billion dollars. In reality Netflix paid for the rights to distribute a show and paid for the infrasture to stream 3 billion minutes of it in hopes that people keep renewing their subscription. It definitely made them a lot of money, but not 3 billion.
3 billion minutes watched does not equal 3 billion dollars paid to Netflix.
You licking boots or not? It’s correct information but sounds like you’re defending it.
I’m watching suits right now… On Netflix.
Me too, as I type this. Getting to the end of season 3 for the first time!
Then you’re a part of the problem. Supporting billionaire corporations making stockholders richer.
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I’ve literally only known about the strike bc it keeps getting mentioned on here. There’s just so many options of entertainment.
You should always care when labor goes against the plutocrats. And you should support it. That you don’t like the quality of the results is a product of said plutocrats putting chains on them.
Here’s a thread that puts it well:
Of course. It’s all about the bottom dollar. No gives two shits about how good something is.
Personally I have a music background, I love music and am a capable guitar player, I’ve studied theory and listened to everything (just about) under the sun. From bluegrass to polka. I like it all.
So when I hear the studio release of paparazzi by Lady Gaga I hear mediocre cookie cutter albeit will produced music. However I once saw a YouTube video of Lady Gaga performing the song on piano live and it was absolutely amazing she is a true musician. But that’s not what sells the studio version of the song is what sells. Nobody’s going to buy Lady Gaga playing the piano while singing. At least not at that point in her career.
So if that version of paparazzi sells let’s make 9,000 other paparazzi’s and sell them. That’s what makes money and everybody else can go to screw themselves.
I’d heard that the Duchess of Sussex used to be an actress, but I’d never seen her in anything. It was a little strange at first to see her playing a paralegal.
You mean c-tier acres Meghan Markle?
For me it was a little strange seeing an unknown actress playing a paralegal become some popular public figure in the UK.
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It’s because that’s what’s rare. Back in the day being literate was extremely rare and most families couldn’t afford to lose the free child farm labor for them to go to school, let alone pay a full time teacher and build a school house with learning materials. Now with free education and tools like computers that make that kind of work and others such as manufacturing with machines and transportation with cars etc. very cheap and plentiful, the hard and rare thing now is to find people who actually like and excel at socializing and connecting businesses and consumers to make deals. AKA middlemen. I don’t like it either but that’s the fact. If it were so easy, everyone would just become the middlemen. Connecting person A with person B is actually a lot harder than it sounds.
Of course, most of us are neuro divergent introverts on the spectrum. Hence why us lowly workers who stay clammed up while working from home or holed up in our cubicles and barely venture outside to hang out in the break room let alone go out for networking events won’t become those middlemen and watch our negotiating power and salaries falter.
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and no royalties? $3000, would be few, even for only one professional writer.
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
Most doctors aren’t paid enough either, and the supply of doctors is kept low to keep the price of care high, the cost of becoming a doctor is inflated by, among other things, the amount of residency programs available is limited making them very expensive to get into.
The whole thing is engineered to extract wealth, not functionally deliver a supply of goods and services to those who do work.
with a few exceptions like doctors
Even then… Elective plastic surgeons make far more than virologists or ER techs. Radiologists can earn more by owning an MRI machine and charging for its use than by billing to interpret the machine’s results. Hospital administrators at big clinics earn more than staff physicians. Insurance company admins can earn more than doctors. Shareholders in medical firms earn most of all.
The fact that I had to look up who Edward Jenner was, and that I (unfortunately) immediately know who Kylie or Bruce Jenner is (to use the same last name), cynically proves your point.
Nurses and firemen should drive lambos, bankers should eat scraps. But alas, human nature rewards greed, but expects humanity.
Better they uploaded it on torrent and asked for donations
Seeing how writing absolutely nosedived after 2-3 seasons, I find it hard to sympathize with them for ruining one of my favorite shows.
Might not have ruined it if they were paid properly.
Are they complaining about not getting a fair salary while they were working on the show?
And generally the pay doesn’t correlate with quality in hollywood. I’m really confused about what gave you the idea that it does.
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.
I can’t think of a more fair model than "sum up what the user watched, divide that across what they watched, distribute according to whatever agreements they have with those rights holders. At least then Netflix gets out of the business of being the bad guy.
“Hey if you don’t think you’re getting your cut, take that up with the network that sold us your show for pennies”
Why make the math so hard?
If the company is selling/lending their content to another, just give people a fixed % of the deal, agreed beforehand, basically like ownership shares paying dividends.
If it’s first party, set an engagement metric or two (minutes watched or whatever) that trigger a bonus payment.
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.
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.
similar numbers to Spotify, but sadly there’s no musicians union
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.
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.
I have a cassette full of recordings he gave me somewhere, at least I hope I do. I really need to hunt it and digitize it.
Dude was awesome.
His old guitar shop is now a food pantry. He lived in the back room in that tiny, dusty old shop and constantly had people over playing music. He always loved to see me coming because in Appalachia everyone plays bluegrass and I don’t. He wasn’t a huge fan of “the grass” but he played along any way until he shook too bad to do it. He was practically blown in half in the war and the damage got him down when he was older.
I’d come in and he’d say, “take my strat and show me something.”
I got my first guitar from him (technically my third but it was the one I learned on). A blue Chinese strat copy called a Lotus. I still have it but I need to reassemble it. God, I should do that. I’d love to hear that nasty buzz again. It’s been nearly 20 years since I played that thing.
I really need to hunt it and digitize it.
And upload it to the Internet Archive!
That reminds me: I have a cassette of parody songs from a local radio station (Fox 97’s Shower Stall Singers) somewhere that might end up lost to history if I don’t find it and upload it.
What the fuck would possess someone to do that?
/c/theydidthemath
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.
It’s 3k to a few of many writers for 11 total episodes. We don’t know the actual streaming numbers of those exact episodes either. Could they be paid better? Maybe, but no one has compared this to the traditional residuals they did get.
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.
they’re probably going to make 5k a year for 6 months a work for 30 years from 11 episodes of 1 show. they might be owed more, but there is a ton of missing context around this that passing judgment on what could be a simply outdated contract from before streaming was a major consideration. if this is just a fraction of what an equivalent contribution to a show would have made from TV reruns or home media sales, then there is a conversation to be had, but no one has brought that up.
