First statistical evidence that the Writers’ Guild got screwed
February 15th, 2009 by screenwriterguy
On Friday, Neilsen published the first tracking results for online television consumption. The result was that Lost was the big winner, with 1.4 million unique viewers in December. Saturday Night Live and Grey’s Anatomy followed.
In the case of Lost, that number would be about 5% of an average live broadcast audience. And since it’s spread over an entire month, really it’s a drop in the bucket. However, let us remember a couple of things. First, these figures don’t include sites like Hulu.com. As far as I am concerned, Hulu features a viewing experience far preferable to any of the network sites, and in cases where it doesn’t just forward the viewer to the network, is probably representative of a comparable number of views. Meanwhile, in December when these measurements were taken… Lost wasn’t on yet! The numbers reflect people getting excited to remember all the plot twists before the show returned in January. We should expect January numbers to be much higher, and February (which would be the first month to have a new episode each Wednesday) to be higher still.
Now recall that, per the 2008 strike settlement, writers make zero dollars during the first seventeen days following network broadcast. The studios claimed they needed a “promotional” period (never mind that the “promotional” period follows the broadcast…) They claimed revenues currently are so small that they cannot possibly share. It is far too early, they said, to know how the internet will play out, or to discuss paying any money to the people who created the content they’re using to forge a new revenue stream for themselves. Well, I caught Grey’s via the net recently, and I watched Jack-in-the-Box wheeled into a hospital multiple times. I not only didn’t (couldn’t) fast forward through the commercials like on my TiVo, but–due to the obnoxious repetetiveness–I still remember what the commercial was for, a week later, and I sorta feel like having a Meaty Breakfast Burrito. Someone made some money, and the writers deserve a percentage. It doesn’t matter if that percentage is small, but it does matter that there’s a percentage.
Joss Whedon recently spoke about the economics of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, a pioneering effort to develop new content for the internet, and to redefine the business model of production. In a Wharton interview, he summed up the strike’s results nicely:
We can’t accept anything remotely like [our current situation] with the studios.
When the studios talk about the difficulty of monetizing the Internet, they’re not lying. There are a lot of paradigms wherein you aren’t making that much money. But it’s all pure money for them because they have these libraries they can just put on. They’re really not interested in putting on original stuff because they can just throw the libraries on and make free money off of that. None of us is in that position.
For [the studios] not to offer the creative community a percentage of what they make — they say, “oh, it’s too difficult” and “we’re not going to make any money” — is disingenuous to the point of criminality. What they’re making is pure profit. For them to shut out the people who actually created the content is something that should be looked into by a federal investigatory committee.
That really says it all. Whatever money you’re making, networks, share.
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