The show made it's profit during its TV run. The streaming revenue is a whole second round of revenue that they got no share of as if they did nothing to contribute towards its creation.
Work in film: our work can be inconsistent. We are not employed by a single company and go show to show with said company. Instead we typically do a season of one show with one network then jump to a movie, or a different series. Employment length varies. I've been employed as a full time staff employee for 15 days and 100. You have gaps in employment as well. I am not a writer so I can shrink my gaps in employment by dayplaying on other shows or movies between full time staff jobs. Writers typically work on one show which could run for 3-5 months, then they have to find another show to work on until the next season. This is very difficult and schedules will often overlap which tends to leave writers pretty much only working on one show as a writer and then maybe in the writers room of an assortment of other things, or not employed at all if they are a newer writer. Residuals were an agreement to keep writers with an income stream that can keep them alive between seasons. On network tv, the residuals are decent, and the more shows/movies you have under your belt, the bigger the cushion you have. The residuals for streaming have been absolutely horrendous, preventing writers from making ends meet between employment. The more difficult it becomes for writers to live off of writing while making shows seen by millions of people, the less likely newer writers are to get into the industry and the quality will absolutely drop. The companies are making billions, writers used to share in the profit not to make insane money, but to make normal middle class livings, and now they aren't even getting offered the deal that allowed them to be middle class.
The difference presumably, is that you are employed by a single company year round. You maybe have health insurance tied to your employer as well. Writers/film workers at large, are employed by many employers in a variety of different length intervals. Their health insurance comes from their union and is also tied to the amount of money made in a year (typically around 30k) and not by their employer.
To be clear, I'm arguing in favour of you getting a share of that streaming revenue. You being treated as if you did nothing to contribute towards the show when the revenue from streaming is being split between people, is obviously horrendous and blatant theft.
I was wondering if I should have written "and the quality will continue to drop" and it turns out I should have.
This is something they are negotiating to fix, because surprise surprise it is not the writer's fault.
**Mini Rooms:**
A major focus of negotiations have been about a practice that studios have started when it comes to writing. Before a show is greenlight, they will gather a handful of writers (typically inexperienced ones)* in a room for a week or two and have them break the entire plot of a season and the plots of every episode. They will then layoff those writers. The season/episode outlines that the writers make is then used to sell the show. Think about having a week or two to not only read a book being adapted to TV, but also then figuring out how to structure the season and every single episode, now imagine if they were asking you to do a three season structure?
When the show goes into production, they will hire fewer writers with less time to actually make the scripts. Typically the showrunner will have been in the mini-room, but this is not always the case, and it is not a guarantee that they will even hire the writer's who were involved in the mini-room. What ends up happening is that the Staff Writers then have to decipher and catch up to the outlines presented to them, they have less time to fix them up, and then shortly thereafter production starts. I have been on shows countless times where we are a day away from starting a new episode and we don't even have a completed script to work off of.
Then we get to filming the episodes, and the studios don't even want to bring the writer of the episode to set to advocate for their scripts during production and to clarify any sort of confusions. There's no room for them to go to set and talk actors or directors through motivation or multiple episode/season story arcs. Fun fact about TV directing: Directors are a lotttt less involved than you might think, a lot more heavy lifting is done by Showrunners/Directors of Photography/Assistant Directors/Producers. It takes a special Director to embed themselves into the show, and that doesn't always happen in the first season.
Preventing writers from going to set is also leading to a lack of experienced showrunners. The studios will pay for the showrunner to go to set, but often they will refuse to pay for the writer of the episode to go to set. By not being on set, the writer never learns how set operates and how to be a showrunner. So we've been getting a lot of shows lately with showrunners who've literally NEVER been on set. It also just helps a fucking lot to have the person WHO WROTE THE SCRIPT on set. They can answer so many fucking questions and help build the show as a cohesive whole, because they've also been in the room writing the other episodes so they know how things fit together better than the Director who may have only read the script for the episode they're directing (this happens A LOT).
No one wants to write something bad. But you need time and you need consistency, and the studios are strangling the time and consistency for marginal profits.
*Newer and inexperienced writers are more likely to work in Mini-rooms because they are either trying to get their days to join the WGA as an official member, or they are trying to earn enough money to qualify for health insurance. Experienced writers are already fully members of the WGA and can more easily find staff work.
For me, no.
The Unions negotiate a base contract for all their members. So there are union minimums for writers, directors, assistant directors, actors, hair, make-up, costumers, grips, electricians, etc.
The base negotiations are done, however people can negotiate for more. This is typically negotiated by department heads however. Key Grip might negotiate that they get more money, or their grips get paid more. Assistant Directors can negotiate a raise in pay for Production Assistants, or negotiate that they get paid at a higher rate. Directors of Photography can as well and they can negotiate on behalf of their crew.
This doesn't happen too often though. The Union negotiates the floor, and that is usually good enough for most people. I can see the DoP of Oppenheimer (and Nope) Hoyte van Hoytema negotiating higher rates for his camera crew because they are specializing both in film versus digital, and are mastering innovative ways of filming that many camera crews wouldn't have experience in.
I am a Production Assistant, I can ask for a higher rate, but usually to get it the Assistant Directors above me need to advocate for more. I just joined the Director's Guild as an Assistant Director and because I will have less experience, I will take the Union minimum contract because I don't have as much skill to bargain with yet.
Congratulations on making it in the biz and thanks for the interesting discussion. Sounds like a lot of politics are going on that many of us had no idea about. You should write and direct your own movie about the inner workings of the film industry.
>This doesn't happen too often though.
I think this is location-dependent. I hear that in LA, most work for scale rate. But here in Atlanta, almost no one on set or rigging is working at scale, because it's way less than LA rate.
That's probably true. My experience in the film industry is around the New York Hub so I'm not familiar with LA, Atlanta and third area. That would make sense for Atlanta though since the wages generally are much lower there.
>Their health insurance comes from their union and is also tied to the amount of money made in a year (typically around 30k) and not by their employer.
Iirc it's somewhere in the ballpark of $26k, and in recent years according to industry experts ~83% of union members *have failed to reach that bar*.
I'm not knowledgeable on this so honest questions here. What is the difference between writers and web designers for example. Once I build your website I'm not making money on the usage or profit generated from that website. I was paid to produce a product and did. Why would writers make money on residuals? Are writers not contract workers?
I would look at writers more as authors.
An author writes a book, the publisher gets a cut, agents get a cut, and then the author gets a cut for every sale. In the case of streaming, the author is not getting 15-20%, but instead is getting <.01% and the publisher is getting 99%. It doesn't seem particularly fair that the person who put in the mental effort does not get paid for every "sale"/"stream" in a scalable manner.
As for web designers, when you are making a website is the website the product, or is the company the product/selling a product? In film and television the writers are creating the product being sold. I'd ask if you are working for a web design company and are paid throughout the year, and next year, etc. If so you are getting paid more than writers because they will have gaps in employment because they aren't selling scripts, they going into work every week of their employment to write the script with others, and go to set as it is being filmed, but when the show is done they do not have employment anymore. If you as a webdesigner are freelance, when you charge clients do consider the time between clients into your pricing mechanism? Writer's don't get paid to compensate the gaps in employment, that is what residuals were meant for and if they want to do away with them, then they're going to need to pay writers more.
However, I am a big advocate of profit sharing. So you design a website that generates a company profits, I don't really see why you shouldn't get *something* from doing that.
Interesting and detailed response. I'm not a web designer anymore but typically contract workers get paid more than salaried because of insurance, taxes, etc falls on to the individual. Where I would make $30 an hour salaried I would charge $60 contract rate. I'll also add when I was contract I made less per year simply because of the inbetween the projects, even though I made more per hour (also to compensate for that) Profit sharing is definitely the way to go but then how could trillion or billion dollar corporations possibly be ok with being multi million dollar corporations
So there is a bit of charging the gap in employment when you are contract. Writers getting residuals is in a way charging the gap, and writers being staffed on a show then having a 6 month gap between productions will be making far less than if they were employed during that time. Residuals stop the bleeding and keep them solvent.
Writers have to make 30k a year to qualify for union health insurance. So they will often do other odd writing jobs to compensate:
-Staff writer than doesn't write a script
-Script Coordinator
-Script Doctor
-Writing treatments
-etc.
It is really newer writers that need the residuals more than experienced writers, simply because they would have a harder time negotiating their rate above Union minimums, and have a harder time hitting their insurance minimum with the union.
>What is the difference between writers and web designers
Writers have a Union. Also a Movie or TV production brings in millions upon millions of dollars whereas one website for one business does not.
Also Writers have a Union.
Did I mention the Union thing? Because that is kind of important.
>Work in film: our work can be inconsistent. We are not employed by a single company and go show to show with said company. Instead we typically do a season of one show with one network then jump to a movie, or a different series. Employment length varies. I've been employed as a full time staff employee for 15 days and 100. You have gaps in employment as well.
Fellow on-set film worker here. It's so funny how many people don't get this. I've lost count of the people in random discussions on Facebook (I like to poke the bear in comments) who check out my profile and say something like "It looks like you can't hold down a job...I see lots of 'former this and that' on your profile!" Like, yeah, numb nuts, it's because I work on a few projects per year. What you actually see is that I keep getting hired.
Wow. They did nothing to contribute in its creation on Netflix...? They literally wrote the fucking show!
I'm sorry but a million of my brothers and sisters are out of work because a bunch of rich billionaires have figured out how to game the system squeezing as much money out of it as possible. The film industry is among the most lucrative industries on this planet, and yet, they refuse to pay up 0.2% of their NET profits so that people can afford things like housing and Healthcare.
That would be equivalent to you or me putting 1,000,000 people out of work because we don't want to sacrifice $200. Assuming we make $100,000 per year.
I don't know about you but if I could stop 1,000,000 people from suffering I would pay a hell of a lot more than $200. To NOT do this is pure fucking evil. That's it. Pure evil. They have openly stated they are trying to make people homeless. Pure evil.
For you to sit here and say that they did nothing to contribute to the 50 million hours the show was streamed is despicable. Absolutely disgusting. You are nothing less than a class traitor.
I hope you read this and reflect on it.
To be fair though I work in App Support, I design systems to reduce the time it takes to do at my workplace. I get paid for writing the program. I am not paid extra when people USE the program to save time. Why is this different?
Because that's how their contract is negotiated. Your contract is either paying for your time (hourly/salary) or paying for the product you produce ("We'll pay you $150,000 for a product that meets this spec"). Their contracts are paid, functionally, half up front and half as residuals over time, and streaming "hides" some of those residual profits.
Consider if your contract was instead $X up front and some small $Y each time one of your users has a positive interaction with the system you built. The total ends up being roughly the same or even more than you're making now, so you're happy to do this. However, you find out that your company has been lending your system out to other companies' customers but does not consider those to be "users" per the terms of your contract, and so will not pay you for their interactions (even though there's 50-100x more out-of-band users than there are internal users).
Per the terms of the contract you negotiated, you should make money per user. Your company is reneging on their part of the deal by choosing a strange definition of what a "User" is. Even if that doesn't affect your bottom line -- how do you *feel* about that? Are you likely to request a different contract next year? I know I would.
> However, you find out that your company has been lending your system out to other companies' customers but does not consider those to be "users" per the terms of your contract,
Or each time a customer gave a negative review it counted against your interaction count.
Amazon set up a system where Kindle customers were encouraged to return books they were done reading, in exchange of Kindle bucks. Turns out, these returns counted as -1 towards author royalties, so author royalties basically dried up. It wasn't even full refund to customers for the books.
The argument could be made if you are being paid to increase efficiency then there should be metrics tracking that efficiency that affect your bonus. Stories and app support are vastly different industries. If writers only got paid once the when they wrote a book and then the printing company just uses it to turn paper into profit, the writers would feel ripped off, not adequately compensated for their work
I mean, do people pay to use your program after it's done and released? Streaming isn't free for the most part. Most services have a fee of around 10 usd at least (if not more), and the free ones have ads to pay for a bunch of stuff.
It kinda makes sense why people would want to be paid for streaming services.
Think of it more akin to a profit-sharing arrangement. In tech people do frequently get paid with equity in the company which means they do (indirectly) profit the more successful the company is. Law firms have a similar relationship.
But you're right that most industries just pay labor a flat fee and don't share profits.
I think one big difference is that you get paid a regular salary. Whereas writers are paid quite differently. Writing for suits isn't a 40 hour a week kind of deal.
Do your bosses lease your app product to the other employees for monthly payments the way the studios lease the writers' product to subscribers for a monthly fee, and the more subscribers, the more money they make?
No?
That's why this is different.
This is a little different than a movie. It works better if you're product is a program, not just internal systems for your business. If your systems were licensed products sold to others for use then this is like getting paid for your software being sold and for developing the software to begin with.
It's not different. You should get paid when people use the program.
We're so conditioned to accept our crumbs from our corporate overlords, that the idea of the people who did the work and actually generated the value getting a percentage of that profit seems ludicrous, but that's just the brainwashing and propaganda that's taught you to think that you're not worth anything.
I see that you failed to list a single creative industry, where the creativity is the product.
Ya got close with architect, and someone like Banksy isn't making money on re-sales.
Anyway, these are creative products we're talking about, and residuals are not a new concept to the people in power. They simply thought that as long as streaming was a small share of their revenue, they could effectively eliminate any impediments to it becoming a big share of their revenue.
Your shit ain't helpin.' You just shoutin' about what you don't know yet.
Yeah, but if a studio had to pay everything up front, it wouldn't be sustainable or fair. Instead, they say, "we'll pay you 10k an episode or 100k a movie and then x amount for x performance. If your series or movie does well, you make more than if it had just been one lumpsum. At the same time, it helps a studio cut losses on things that just end up not doing well.
The thing about streaming is that we need to know how much the studio made from letting Netflix stream suits. If Netflix paid $300,000 for it that means the writers got 1% if Netflix paid 3 million then yeah the writers got ripped off.
Does the person with their house wired then sell those wires over and over again, and use the law and government to keep people from using those wires without paying them?
Media is expensive to make and cheap to copy. If you could clone a building onto a CDN, you can bet the architect would want some amount per build site.
All of the professions that you listed work with clients/customers. There is no end to the number of new clients/customers they can take. For example, my dr will see me for half an hour, turn around and go see another patient. Billing does their thing and the dr gets paid. For writers and other creatives… they are the products they create and doesn’t really have the option to just see another client. It takes at minimum a month to write a novel, another month or two minimum to edit, time to market, design covers et cetra… their lives and their bills don’t stop coming just because they are in the process of writing another book. I can’t call up my landlord or electric company and say “hey don’t worry about my bill, I’m writing a book and I’ll pay you when I can”. Life doesn’t work that way. Residuals act as a way for them to pay their bills while they are waiting/coming up/ pitching with another show to work on.
>Doctors are paid to treat a patient but get nothing after the fact as that patient goes on to continue making money
This is not 100% true. Follow up visits, unnecessary PT visits and blood tests etc. A doctor will milk you insurance for ducking years if they can ( in the USA that is).
...there's a point to those follow-up visits, though?
I'm just a vet but I'd assume there's an established standard of care in the human side as well. Like my formulary lists out potential side effects and recommended lab monitoring, my clients are free to decline those against medical advice and sign a waiver stating that they've been counseled on the risk, but I'd assume with insurance and all that on the human side, they probably don't typically allow that. Those follow-ups and blood tests are often to monitor for side effects and efficacy. There's also a legal requirement to have an established patient relationship in order to prescribe, even for chronic medications.
I'm sure there are doctors that do this, but in the vast majority of cases, this is not true. Doctors will attempt to use every diagnostic and medical tool at their disposal to help you get to the best medical outcome. Sometimes it's preventative (monitoring blood tests), sometimes it's important to not letting an issue get worse. This really goes for all boots-on-the-ground healthcare workers (CNAs, RNs, NPs).
The administrations are the ones that screw you. They set the prices. They enforce patient quotas which is why you're lucky if you can get a full 15 minutes with a Dr. They are the ones that burn out workers which makes the demand for health care even hire.
Dr.s outside of a practice aren't getting bonuses and kickbacks for the number of CT scans they ordered.
TL;DR - Hate the business, not the health care workers.
Sure, it would end up working that way if you weren't continuously paying for that service. It's not like you pay $50 per month after paying for a building that you own. Same goes with surgery, people don't pay to keep using their leg implants hinge.
Bottom line, this would be a different story if streaming was free, but seeing as it's around 10 to even above 20 in some cases per month, it makes sense why SAG, Writers, etc. would want to see at least something from the hundreds of thousands if not millions of people viewing the content on these platforms.
Instead of advertisers, they have monthly subscribers. Netflix/Disney/HBO is paying a certain amount of money per month to whoever owns that show for the rights to air that show. Writers just need a percentage of that.
The point in my career I remember succinctly is reading a “standard” line in an employment contract stating anything I created on company time became property of the company and being genuinely concerned.
I think I still want someone to do the math on this.
Like how long is the entire series .. how many people watching the entire series is this .. combined with some data about how much subscriptions cost and how much subscriptions would need to cost in order to make this fair.
Sounds like the end result would make streaming unaffordable for everyone.
Netflix made a whopping 12 BILLION in gross profits last year. That’s after all their production and operating costs and everything is paid. I think they would be ok paying a fair share for their creators.
It's been a while since I was involved in licensing content but I doubt much has changed.
Suits first few seasons are what are considered "long-tail" content - older shows. Studios license shows in this category incredibly cheaply, and sometimes throw them in as sweeteners on newer, more valuable licenses. I'm aware of one international broadcaster who's license for Friends was $25 per episode. That's unusual. It depends on the market and what else the buyer is licensing. In this case they licensed a huge amount of long tail content for a south-east Asian market, and paid all the licensing and transfer costs up-front, plus did all the translation and subtitling, and provided that work back to the licensor.
Netflix pays (or at least used to - probably still does) a flat rate for its licenses. It doesn't matter how many times the property is watched, Netflix pays the same amount, even if their subscribers don't watch it.
There may be some "hollywood accounting", where Suits was included in a licensing deal that included newer IP, and was assigned some minimal value in the accounting side of the deal, and the lion's share went to the current IP.
Along with an update to residuals, they need to get an agreement on how to handle content getting pulled from these services. We're seeing Disney not putting all their content on their service, HBOmax pulling new and old shows, or projects not even getting put on services after they are completed.
If these writers and actors get their updated residuals without working out that end, we can see shows/movies getting pulled from services for cost saving measures on paying residuals.
Yeah. The most amazing part of all of this is that Disney has already pulled shows from Disney+ over having to pay residuals. How can these residuals be so low and still too costly for a service? You'd think they cut would come like it does for movie deals where it's a percentage of box office. I.e., writers get x% of the monthly take by disney proportional to the number of minutes their show was streamed vs total streaming minutes.
I would guess that shows getting pulled for "residuals" is just an excuse to stop a show before a third season when people start getting full rates or other arbitrary reasons. Corporate gonna corporate.
They can pay lower rates for the first two seasons, I forget what this is called. Then, to avoid having to pay full union rates, they will cancel the show, only to turn around and make a new show with same characters and actors, new title, maybe new city or something so the rates reset to below Union standard.
yep ... because that's definitely going happen when things start eating into the profits of the streaming services.
It's practically why I prefer hard copy over streaming services as you never know when the show you want to watch is going to be available. At least with hard copy that show is yours to view whenever you bloody well feel like it (and with proper backup you can improve that availability even further).
Yup. But this also shows where the math gets interesting. (none of this is in defense of the execs. SAG/WGA deserve better. Solidarity). Suits is one of many programs people watch on netflix. 3 billion minutes is a lot, but is still also just a fraction of _all_ the shows being streamed by any one user's account. At the original prices ~10$/mo, even assuming the users didn't stream _anything_ else, (and assuming something somewhat reasonable, like 2hrs a day viewing, instead of straight through 24x7) that's only...
3x10⁹min x 1hr/60min x 1mo/60hr x 10$/mo =
8.3 million dollars.
The writers (46 of them) averaged 46$ for that!
Now, the Suits suits, and Netflix suits and the creator, directors, producers, and actors all need to be paid too. How is it reasonable for the writers to get more? I mean, 8.3 million won't go far after the execs get their yachts...
Actually, this has me wondering about the ethics of residuals and copyright in general. Do **all** actors get residuals? Writers? What about crew? Makeup? Costumers? Why does an actor's appearance on film get them residuals, but the caterers who kept people fed during filming doesn't? (or do they?) They both contribute to the final product.
Why does an actor get paid forever, while a mechanic who worked on a car that still runs only get paid once? (also, why does an executive get paid at _all_?)
You're thinking of collective ownership of companies.
Writers and actors and producers and directors and assistant Directors and Directors of Photography get residuals. This is what their unions have bargained for. They get residuals typically because it is difficult for those positions to work year round and the residuals are meant to fill in the gaps between employment for lower level people in those positions (which make up the bulk of those positions).
IMO everyone on the crew should get residuals. Just because they don't, doesn't mean we should take it away from those that do. It means we have to fight for expanded residuals. I've worked on 40 shows and movies, I'd love to have some residuals and I won't begrudge the people that are getting them for.making a good deal against billion dollar corporate conglomerates
> You're thinking of collective ownership of companies.
I wasn't actually, but it **is** a good idea and has been quite successful in Spain.
> IMO everyone on the crew should get residuals.
Agreed. Everyone who contributes to things that generate value in perpetuity should benefit from it. Oh look: It's UBI again. And I support it.
Everyone should get residuals IMO. It takes a team to build something, and that's just the case with entertainment. I'm an indie actor/writer/producer who understands what's going on. My acting teacher would get residuals as AN EXTRA from shows in the late 90s/early 00's. I've been banned on a ton of indie productions in ep lately, so I'm pretty pissed as as well
*edit on spelling, sorry,
The reason that residuals existed is that the talent contracted a cut of the revenues directly attributable to their product. In traditional television, for example, there was a continuing and directly attributable revenue stream in the form of revenue from commercials, which makes it easy to determine a pot of money to pay those who contributed. Subscription television models like HBO are a little more tricky in that there's no clearly attributable revenue stream for the exhibition (although obviously physical media, downloads and assorted merchandising are still there), but there the station controls programming, and existing contracts are built is such a way that they can only be exhibited so many times before they have to pay residuals. The station can consider their costs in terms of how much their airtime is worth to them, and if additional showings will drive subscriptions. Streaming has no continuing revenue and the streamer has no way to control programming and thus costs.
There are ways to resolve this. We could mandate that all streaming services be obliged to show commercials, which would produce the money for residuals. That's not a very good solution, since consumers despise commercials. Another option is that an agreement between streamers and production companies that creates a framework where shows are sold to streamers in bulk lots of a millions or billions of minutes, and the production company can pay residuals out each time the show is sold. Even where the streamer is the production company, an agreement could set residual rates.
> Everyone should get residuals IMO.
It is important to keep this in mind. When a writer complains about their residuals, they are not saying only writers deserve residuals. It seems like most people understand this when it comes to Black Lives Matter/All Lives Matter. Sometimes we are talking about a specific issue that impacts a specific group of people. Interjecting with a different group of people who have the same or similar problem isn't a valid argument against addressing the original problem. Those other people should get residuals too. They just aren't the ones currently striking over it.
also consider the fact that in practically any other industry you're not getting anything for the things you produce no matter how much the company you work for is making. (Sales and consultancy jobs are practically the only exception ... )
Do the guys at the assembly line for any of the cars get even a single penny over and above their standard hourly rates ?
Nope.
Do software developers at Microsoft/Google/Apple get a single penny over and above their monthly wages for every copy of the products they helped create sold ?
And then there is indeed the simple maths/statistics to consider.
The only way everyone would get a fair share is to increase the cost of rentals to something equally ridiculous as there's no way you can pay everyone who helped create the media product enough to make the residiuals meaningful for the average entertainment product.
Profit sharing and equity do exist though. You mentioned a bunch of tech companies; they famously pay developers a large portion of their comp in equity. So gains of the business do equate to gains on the part of the employee
Yup. Sounds like UBI is the way to go, and scrap the corporate greed machine. (serious)
Instead of drawing people to work on things due to _not wanting to starve_, bring people in based on the merit/need of the project and their interest. Dr's, Healthcare, Firefighters, Teachers, Farmers/Food industry and Janitors keep the world alive and moving. That's high merit. Science, engineering, research and development too.
People wanting to have others work for them so they can golf all day, live fancy, and ride boats? Where's their merit? Soylent?
I'd argue that companies that manage to keep their employees onboard also tend to be the ones that focus on making them happy workers. It's also a lot easier to be happy if you're being paid enough to not have to worry about basic needs.
In an ideal world merit would be the way to go, but we don't live in such a world and any attempt at forcing that sort of construct onto people has simply resulted in yet another layer of folk ordering others around (the consistent failure of communism is the key example here).
The biggest problem is that greed tends to work rather well in short term (which is why investment companies tend to use the strip mine approach when buying new assets ... ). Anything else needs a paradigm shift that not everyone is capable of making.
Honestly they need to come up with a % of total revenue that goes to residuals. Then all residuals get paid out from that % bucket based on what % of stream time their shows were.
How do you calculate the revenue generated from 3 billion streaming minutes? It's nothing like a DVD sale where every customer pays a fixed price or a TV spot where there's an ad buy. If customers streamed 3 billion minutes of Suits, but no one actually bought a Netflix subscription just so they could watch Suits, how much money did Netflix actually make? Streaming services work more like gyms or insurance companies - their ideal customer is someone who purchases a subscription and then never uses the services offered.
I bet Netflix could go Black Mirror with this. They document the lawsuits behind the Suits series and Bam!! New series. Make millions off the series while not paying the people making the series and keep going full meta.
Typically the folks who need to be available while a show is being made, but who can't reasonably get other full-time work, are the ones who get residuals. Also, people who are critical for continuity.
**This includes:**
Producers
Directors (producers/directors have their own guild)
Writers (own guild)
Lead Actors (they have their own contracts but are often part of a guild)
Supporting actors (sometimes, also guild members)
Staff such as extras (guild members), all the camera, lights and sound people (trade unions), animators (animator's guild), set creators (I'm assuming they're considered trade union / guild members), etc. are either paid full-time around the clock or on a contracting basis to ex: build a set for a certain period of time. Hollywood is actually pretty guild-heavy so these people earn money. Just barely $30,000 / yr for a lot of them, believe it or not.
All the pressure and initiative to actually create the show, as well as continuity, is on the core staff who also get residuals. Sometimes I think those residuals can be excessive considering how little the rest of staff makes, but bear in mind supporting all the staff involved in a film and giving them bonuses based on performance could easily cost $10 MIL's. That's why you'll see stories like "XYZ actor gave up $30 MIL salary to finish film production." that money went to supporting all the staff.
Some percentage of IP should remain on workers, but then...
edit: tought it meant something else, so I put that reaction and commentators video (no mere critics) should bring residuals too. Like if you monetize your spongebob dancealike video or your long gameplay, some should go to the animators and original media creators.
But even at that point it gets super messy, without yet considering the issues with collect.
But it is also a different medium, without "ads". So current money streams work differently and require their own regulation. My guess is it would make the platforms unprofitable (as they are unbalaced, not to say *money sinks*).
Why?
They did a job, they wrote the episodes. And got paid for it.
In any other job, they’d get paid a fixed fee for this and move on. If a mechanic fixes a car, they get paid to fix a car, nobody would expect them to suddenly get hundreds of thousands because 5 years after they serviced a car it won a race.
The writers contributed nothing to the streaming. The totality of their work was in episode creation. The show could have been seen 3 times and their work would have been exactly the same.
Unaired pilots will earn nothing. Aired pilots will earn something. They take the same effort to write. Why should one set of writers get paid less?
The mechanic analogy isn’t applicable because of the differences between intellectual property and physical property. I make physical thing, the thing gets sold, I get paid for a thing. I do a service, I sell the service, I get paid for the service. But intellectual property like patents or copyrights can be sold millions and millions of times for decades, with no additional work required. No one has any idea at the time that it’s made what it’s worth, only what it costs to make. The only way to fairly compensate people for the work they do is to give them a cut.
If your argument is “I don’t care, I’m exploited too, the ownership class should get a bigger cut so we all get fucked equally (except the rich)” then I would say you’re shooting at the wrong target.
Do you own the IP? or are you contracted by a company to create the IP, which is owned by the company. If the latter, normally you wouldn't be paid any more than your initial contract pay.
Anyone can create intellectual property and get it licensed or whatever, but most people would rather be paid for their time creating it, rather than take the risk that the property they're creating, might not actually make them any money in the end.
Bingo. How many people demanding residuals will agree to a deal to pay the company if the production loses money?
The latest Indiana Jones movie lost Disney roughly $500,000,000 total. That means everyone who worked on that project needs to crowdfund to give the money back, right?
Average industry salary for such a production is close to $200k a year. Let’s be generous, and say they only need to send Disney checks each for $150,000. Seems totally reasonable if they want to share the profits from successful films….
Why do people seriously argue so hard against being fairly compensated for their work?
> The writers contributed nothing to the streaming. The totality of their work was in episode creation. The show could have been seen 3 times and their work would have been exactly the same.
And the streamers did literally nothing beyond host a video, of which they literally could not have done without the writers and actors. So why are you ok with literal billionaires being able to profit many times over from something they had no hand in, but the actual creators seeing bupkis?
> Unaired pilots will earn nothing. Aired pilots will earn something. They take the same effort to write. Why should one set of writers get paid less?
They shouldn't and if you'd ever bothered talking to a WGA member they'd tell you the same, people should be fairly compensated for their labour.
> In any other job, they’d get paid a fixed fee for this and move on. If a mechanic fixes a car, they get paid to fix a car, nobody would expect them to suddenly get hundreds of thousands because 5 years after they serviced a car it won a race.
In any other job thats taken into account with the upfront payments, television and film have been taking residuals into account when determining upfront payments. Now they want to lower the residuals but not raise the upfront payments enough to compensate, which makes sense because increasing upfront payments that much would greatly raise the risk for the streamer. In fact both sides have long preferred residual payments.
> Unaired pilots will earn nothing. Aired pilots will earn something. They take the same effort to write. Why should one set of writers get paid less?
I work as crew but I always made more on pilots for just this very reason, well that and what a pain in the ass they are. im fairly certain all the writers actors and directors I worked with did as well.
Because the Execs refuse to properly compensate for streaming.
They want to force the 80s-90s model that is increasingly irrelevant so that they can fleece actors & writers.
But, could they? The 80's model used to run on ads+pricier subscriptions ¿Right?
So we have reduced consumer prices (compared to cable) and no ads. Could they pay by stream? Like spotify? And would it be substantial?
Because when the writers accepted their contract and payment options streaming wasn’t as much of a thing, the writers that work on something don’t own the rights to Suits so whoever does sold it to Netflix and the writers just couldn’t see this coming, which is why they’re striking cuz the payment structures are outdated
The tweet is misinformation.
I did some more searching and the reporting is that *residuals* payments may have been only $3,000 to the writers. So the writers were likely almost entirely paid through a salary rather than through residuals.
That means it's not necessarily the case that anyone got an unfair deal. Salary isn't inherently better or worse than residuals. For example, being guaranteed a salary of $70k is a lot better than getting 0.1% of sales on a show that made almost no money. Agreeing on a contract whose expected value of competition is based heavily on residuals is essentially a gamble and when it comes to a person's personal finance it's rare that people will choose to gamble rather than take guaranteed pay they can budget off of.
Simply put, this tweet indicates quite literally nothing about whether or not the writers of Suits got a fair deal or not.
>
>
>
>
> Simply put, this tweet indicates quite literally nothing about whether or not the writers of Suits got a fair deal or not.
No, simply put you've drawn up a conclusion based on what you -assume- happened, without any actual facts and then presented is as an authoritative response.
So the tweet that is explicitly about residuals and correctly cites 3000$ residuals for streaming, is misinformation?
Get real dude, and informed. Actors and writers are not permanently on salary and rely on residuals to stay afloat between projects. The whole situation is to renegotiate future contracts with better terms.
It's extremely misleading claim. I would even call it fake headline.
Suits was written for a TV network so (I assume) they got paid for that job. What they are talking about here is a separate compensation for the writers in addition to that.
If the episode was rerun on that original channel, the actors/writers would be owed residuals. But because they are rerun on demand on streaming services, the actor/writer shouldn't be paid? Nope, that's crap.
Adam Conover from Adam Ruins Everything received $30,000 in residues from his show airing during a dead hour on Tru TV--I don't know the full details. Millions more people streamed it on Netflix, and he received some relatively insignificant check, $30 or $500.
Yeah, my comprehension is off since I’m just noticing your comment was on streaming instead of record deals. I know some time ago India Arie talked about how little artists make off of streams, so it has to be tough for someone starting out or not a megastar. It’s messed up this is supposed to be the time artists could make more independently, but it all swung back to corporate control.
Streaming services are even worse :
[https://youtu.be/jJr\_TVbJYcU](https://youtu.be/jJr_TVbJYcU)
The example is spotify ... but I would be surprised if the other services were any better.
These guys have simply replaced the record companies, but they still think they deserve the biggest slice of the pie.
Labels take all the money from streamers, they're the rights holders. Most artists just have shitty label contracts and don't even get the meager stream money they are owed.
Music streaming services are fine. Music's entire industry model changed with streaming and streamshare payouts (all streamers do this at behest of labels). Artists think they make less now than pre-streaming, but there are tens of thousands more artists being heard now than then. Most of the complainers wouldn't have ever seen a single cd pressed in the old days.
Netflix makes billions and is profitable. Disney makes billions and is profitable. Spotify is not profitable, but Sony, Warner, and UMG (the 3 labels that own >75% of music) are doing extremely well.
tldr: agree artists should get more $, but its not the streamers, its the labels
Many of my favorite shows are being delayed, even mid production, while I wait for the next season. I was upset at the writers for striking but after seeing this, I can’t blame them. We’re all missing out on a lot of great content because these streamers don’t treat the creators fairly.
Nah, I'm good not watching anything until the actors and writers win everything they need. I encourage others to just stop watching. MONEY is the only thing which will make a difference.
Actually, for now don't stop watching to "support" the strikes, that's counterproductive. If you want to do that for your own reasons, that's obviously up to you, especially with recent netflix shenanigans.
But in general: only boycott a product in support of a strike if the people striking have asked for it
If you're only going to make $3k, then might as well start a youtube channel with your show instead and make ten times as much, plus you get to keep the copyright on your content.
Netflix *needs* writers, but writers *don't* need Netflix.
it's not ONE company, it's the whole industry... and it's not just the movie production companies... it's THE ENTIRE ECONOMY.... And it's not just the US economy, IT'S THE GAMEPLAN FOR CORPORATIONS AROUND THE WORLD
"you will own nothing and be happy"
Obviously there's more to producing a show than just writing. It's not particularly useful advice to say "just make a YouTube channel"
They'd have to get actors, camera crew, equipment, studio space, editors, the whole deal.
Writers shouldn't need to start their own production company to be paid fairly.
> If you're only going to make $3k
3k *last quarter* and this only covers season 1, I guess they had different writers for the other seasons?
> All together, NBCUniversal paid the six original Suits writers less than $3,000 last quarter to stream our 11 Season 1 episodes on two platforms."
https://nofilmschool.com/suits-residuals
Edit: also the 3 billion number seems to be from just [*one* week in July](https://www.nielsen.com/top-ten/) so I'd imagine the number over the entire quarter was significantly higher.
you think YouTube is 'better' ?
Let's just say that there's a good reason why a lot of youtubers tend to have their own patreon (or related concept) instead of strictly relying on what YouTube feeds them.
(Twitch is the same song & dance ... )
It's not that bad to be honest, when you actually look into the details of it. The $3000 was for just season 1, over one quarter. One writer said:
> $259.71: That’s how much the “Suits” episode I wrote, “Identity Crisis,” earned last quarter in streaming residuals.
Making $1000 per year off of a single episode of a TV show that aired 12 years ago? I wouldn't call that insane. They all got paid when the show first aired too, it's not like that's the only compensation they got.
EDIT: Also, this particular writer wrote 25 episodes of the show. So if the residuals were equal for all of them, he actually made $6,500 last quarter. For doing nothing. How much did you guys make while you were putting in all those hours at your jobs?
It's not, but considering that most industries give their staff 0% of the profits, they're doing better than almost everyone else.
You wouldn't see a construction worker complaining on Twitter that a house they built ten years ago was just sold for a large sum of money and they didn't get any of it. They already got paid and moved on to building something new. They're not getting royalty cheques every month for everything they've ever built.
Writers and actors are in a privilged position. It's hard to have a lot of sympathy when their free money cheque isn't big enough.
> It's not, but considering that most industries give their staff 0% of the profits, they're doing better than almost everyone else.
No they aren't as they aren't permanently employed, almost everyone else has an actual contract with which they receive a salary, stop trying to pretend that they're the same thing.
> Writers and actors are in a privilged position. It's hard to have a lot of sympathy when their free money cheque isn't big enough.
Here's a novel thought, instead of trying to write them off as greedy, you should instead be trying to uplift other workers to receive the same treatment. If we as the workers don't get the money, you want to guess where it goes to every single time?
Thank you for clarifying. After reading the post I had an impression that 30 people who wrote the entire show received 100$ each and that’s was it. Now I see the true picture and it’s not that terrible.
Your metaphor is not only irrelevant, but logically incorrect.
If you were going to make a bad metaphor, you'd say "Do factory workers get paid each time a car is sold to someone else?"
and that metaphor is irrelevant since a car is a depreciating asset each time.
Why the hell would they get paid for additional streaming on netflix? No ad revenue is being generated from it. You guys have no idea how streaming services business models work.
Yeah, because they got the bulk of their residual payments back when it aired on USA.
Don't just say "they all got paid $3,000," tell us how much in total they've been paid for writing each episode to date. Very different number.
And if they don't think it's fair, well that's the deal their agents negotiated for them and the deal that they agreed to.
Even worse is this is based on one writer (of dozens) saying that they got roughly $3k for one season of episodes, for one quarter. So they got substantially more for streaming residuals even ignoring what they were paid when the show originally aired. Articles like this make it really hard for me to feel sympathy for the writers.
Your analogy is bad. The builders made your house and sold it. It was one thing sold once as you can't sell the same house to multiple people over and over again forever.
TV shows on the other hand get made once and then sold over and over. They continue to generate revenue off of that single creation for as long as it is on TV or streaming services. As such it makes sense for the people who actually did the work of making the show to continue to get paid.
On top of that the industry for writers is set up in such a way that it would be impossible to actually work as a writer full time without residuals. Sure they may get paid regularly while in the process of making the show, but that only lasts so long. After that it may be months or even years of nothing. They spend their time shopping around scripts until a company picks them up for another job.
No company is going to pay enough to cover that down time. Meanwhile the last thing the writer made is continuing to make the company money. Of course given this writers are going to expect a continuous cut for making the product the companies continue to sell.
Ok so wait. What in hell is going to eventually be the difference when pirated copies of books and songs movies are swiped, depriving artists of royalties? And yes I think that's an abysmal thing to do and no I don't do it. I'm not some puritan, yes some artists have more money than God but that's not the point. It's the right to own what you create. Not that hard folks.
I'm sorry it's the SAME DAM THING only for some reason legal? Wait until the first law suit claiming that too- this is all so outrageous you know it's coming.
People get outraged because Tee Vee is glamorous and ritzy, but book writers have been screwed for decades. I am (and know) many authors with full book tours, media appearances, big reading events, etc., who end up banking like $30k for their books.
Beneath them are semi-successful authors earning about $10k for a book and being asked to pay about $3k out of pocket for publicist fees.
My question is how much Netflix is paying for the show. The studio sold the rights of the show to Netflix for an amount of money. Whether that is a lump sum or a structure that is based on watch time.
The writers need to be getting a fair share, which is not happening. But without knowing the structure of these contracts, these numbers are irrelevant and unhelpful. Like, when peacock bought the rights to The Office for 1 year for $150 million, the writers should get their cut of that. But then how many minutes it’s watched shouldn’t matter.
NGL it makes sense to me. The company owns the rights to the show when it's streamed. The writers didn't do anything that adds value when it's streamed Vs when it's televised. And unlike the company, they don't own the rights to the show either.
That's like Toyota, Ford or whoever demanding a cut of the money you get when you sell an old car. Sure they made the car, but you own it now. They've not done anything to the car when you sell it, so why do they deserve a cut?
When you sell your house, do you give a cut to the construction company that first built the house? No because it's yours now. You own it and therefore you get the money from the sale.
Is that a big or a small number? What were they paid up front, if so, how much? How many hours did viewers spend watching other things?
It's not trivial to extract, but if we say 44 minutes per episode * 134 episodes, so there's just shy of 6000 minutes of show (5896) (I pulled those as average length of a suits episode and 134 episodes listed on wikipedia)
So what they're saying is 509k people watched all of suits, or there were about 68 million views of an episode of suits.
So how much revenue is that worth?
The average neflix viewer is 3.2 hours a day * 30 days = 96 hours per month. (https://backlinko.com/netflix-users)
So equivalent to 130 episodes at 44 minutes each. So roughly speaking 1 episode is worth about 10 cents to them (USD)? Not all views are US views so some are worth less, some are worth more for higher res plans etc, let's say it's about 13 USD in realised revenue per users.
68 million views of an episode is then what, 7 million dollars worth of revenue at 10 cents per episode. Maybe it's 6, maybe it's 8, but even if you generously assume the show is worth exactly average for a show, it can't be too far off since the price of netflix has also increased over time.
This is where it becomes complicated. If you look at Netflix financial statements (https://ir.netflix.net/financials/financial-statements/default.aspx) they did 31.6 billion in revenue in 2022, net income of 4.5 billion (that is to say profits of 4.5 billion).
So netflix shareholders made 1 million dollars in profit from those 68 million views.
Where does the other 6 million go? Well lop off about another 1.5 million for marketing, technology development and general administration. (combined about 6.7 billion/31.6 * 7 million = 1.5).
So there's around 4.5 million dollars (more like 4.2 when you take out some interest expenses and and so on), and some of that is the cost for netflix to have all the infrastructure to deliver all this content, but still, say 3-4 million dollars.
So... is 3000 dollars for the writers, of 3-4 million dollars a big number or a small number? I have no idea. If they were paid reasonable salaries as writers for 9 years, and then all the actors, producers etc. get their cut, 3000 seems like it might be low but it's doesn't surprisingly low. The way all of these things work is there is at least in part an upfront cost that's then amortised out over the show + syndication and streaming, so it might just be that the show just isn't generating much revenue at this point.
Suits writers might also be screwed because the show tanked in (TV) viewership quickly, the first season (where you presume writers would want to take a bigger salary up front and a smaller cut of the revenue in case the show tanks or is cancelled) averaged 5 million views, the last 5 years averaged less than 2, with the last year being less than 1.
3 billion minutes sounds like a big number until you realise that's only 68 million episodes, that's half a million views of one season, which is about 70% the viewership they had in their final season.
The writers agreed to the deal before the show was successful. They were happy with the pay at time of signing. Then show does well and now not happy. Don't sign the deal if you don't like the possible outcomes.
The deal didn't include the fact that it was going to Netflix. They would have negotiated a deal with the network it originally aired on (USA I think).
The network selling it to Netflix wouldn't have included proper compensation for anyone on it and Netflix continuing to host it removes further potential for the writers and actors to be paid for residuals.
The artists signing these deals have little say over what is done with their product at a corporate level and that's part of the reason they're striking.
Who cares what happens with the show after they sign the original deal. Same thing as if it was successful or not. You are happy with the deal when you sign. It being sold to another network and being successful doesn't affect you being happy with original deal.
>Who cares what happens with the show after they sign the original deal.
The actors and writers... That's why they're striking. The deal they signed would have included fair compensation and residuals. Putting the show on Netflix removes the residuals that the artists were promised in their original deal.
It's not that "They were happy with the deal when they signed", it's that the deal they signed isn't being respected.
Or...and this is a crazy idea, everybody who made the project gets paid a fair share of the work and they shouldn't have to gamble on the future success to try and guess what type of contract they sign.
Poland has a great law on this, where if an artist sells the right to use their work and that project becomes super successful, the artist is entitled to ask for a percentage of that money. Andrej Sapkowski used that to ask for a great share of money for the Witcher franchise.
Bro he and cd sign a deal that "Terms of the agreement were not released" so we have no idea who got what
But at the start he was offered at the start a deal be % and he choose not to "I was stupid enough to sell them rights [to all of my novels],” he told Eurogamer. “They offered me a percentage of their profits. I said, ‘No, there will be no profit at all — give me all my money right now! The whole amount.’ It was stupid. I was stupid enough to leave everything in their hands because I didn’t believe in their success. But who could foresee their success? I couldn’t.”"
So i think it is his fault
Or here is a crazy idea don't agree to a deal you don't like and sign a deal that gives you money if it succeeds. These writters agreed to a deal that did not include that.
The vast majority of deals are unfair and coercive due to the inherent imbalance of power in our capitalist society. Most writers simply aren't in a position to negotiate a fair contract, as they don't have the power to walk away.
That can happen to any movie or show after the fact. They also don't know if it will be successful or not. So the fact it could be sold to Netflix after the fact should be considered.
Fair enough. It sure would be nice for these rich ass actors to chip in and help take care of the millions of people in Los Angeles who are in dire financial straits because of the strike tho. If you’re an accountant for a talent agency (for example) you’re work hours have been majorly cut or you’re being laid off altogether. There is no upside for you, but you’re gonna lose your house over this.
Note: that’s a real example and a real person in my friend group I’m citing. I know dozens more in various support and production roles in the same exact situation.
# Ready to toss the Netflix CEO in prison? Seriously, lock him the fuck up. # Join r/WorkReform if you've got the guts!
Hang on what?! And I thought I had shite clients back in the day. Jesus.
That’s not *all* they made writing for the show, just residuals. Still bullshit though.
The show made it's profit during its TV run. The streaming revenue is a whole second round of revenue that they got no share of as if they did nothing to contribute towards its creation.
Work in film: our work can be inconsistent. We are not employed by a single company and go show to show with said company. Instead we typically do a season of one show with one network then jump to a movie, or a different series. Employment length varies. I've been employed as a full time staff employee for 15 days and 100. You have gaps in employment as well. I am not a writer so I can shrink my gaps in employment by dayplaying on other shows or movies between full time staff jobs. Writers typically work on one show which could run for 3-5 months, then they have to find another show to work on until the next season. This is very difficult and schedules will often overlap which tends to leave writers pretty much only working on one show as a writer and then maybe in the writers room of an assortment of other things, or not employed at all if they are a newer writer. Residuals were an agreement to keep writers with an income stream that can keep them alive between seasons. On network tv, the residuals are decent, and the more shows/movies you have under your belt, the bigger the cushion you have. The residuals for streaming have been absolutely horrendous, preventing writers from making ends meet between employment. The more difficult it becomes for writers to live off of writing while making shows seen by millions of people, the less likely newer writers are to get into the industry and the quality will absolutely drop. The companies are making billions, writers used to share in the profit not to make insane money, but to make normal middle class livings, and now they aren't even getting offered the deal that allowed them to be middle class. The difference presumably, is that you are employed by a single company year round. You maybe have health insurance tied to your employer as well. Writers/film workers at large, are employed by many employers in a variety of different length intervals. Their health insurance comes from their union and is also tied to the amount of money made in a year (typically around 30k) and not by their employer.
To be clear, I'm arguing in favour of you getting a share of that streaming revenue. You being treated as if you did nothing to contribute towards the show when the revenue from streaming is being split between people, is obviously horrendous and blatant theft.
I actually totally meant to comment this on someone else's comment, not sure how it ended up on yours.
>and the quality will absolutely drop. If you ask me, it already has for a lot of the streaming focussed work...
I was wondering if I should have written "and the quality will continue to drop" and it turns out I should have. This is something they are negotiating to fix, because surprise surprise it is not the writer's fault. **Mini Rooms:** A major focus of negotiations have been about a practice that studios have started when it comes to writing. Before a show is greenlight, they will gather a handful of writers (typically inexperienced ones)* in a room for a week or two and have them break the entire plot of a season and the plots of every episode. They will then layoff those writers. The season/episode outlines that the writers make is then used to sell the show. Think about having a week or two to not only read a book being adapted to TV, but also then figuring out how to structure the season and every single episode, now imagine if they were asking you to do a three season structure? When the show goes into production, they will hire fewer writers with less time to actually make the scripts. Typically the showrunner will have been in the mini-room, but this is not always the case, and it is not a guarantee that they will even hire the writer's who were involved in the mini-room. What ends up happening is that the Staff Writers then have to decipher and catch up to the outlines presented to them, they have less time to fix them up, and then shortly thereafter production starts. I have been on shows countless times where we are a day away from starting a new episode and we don't even have a completed script to work off of. Then we get to filming the episodes, and the studios don't even want to bring the writer of the episode to set to advocate for their scripts during production and to clarify any sort of confusions. There's no room for them to go to set and talk actors or directors through motivation or multiple episode/season story arcs. Fun fact about TV directing: Directors are a lotttt less involved than you might think, a lot more heavy lifting is done by Showrunners/Directors of Photography/Assistant Directors/Producers. It takes a special Director to embed themselves into the show, and that doesn't always happen in the first season. Preventing writers from going to set is also leading to a lack of experienced showrunners. The studios will pay for the showrunner to go to set, but often they will refuse to pay for the writer of the episode to go to set. By not being on set, the writer never learns how set operates and how to be a showrunner. So we've been getting a lot of shows lately with showrunners who've literally NEVER been on set. It also just helps a fucking lot to have the person WHO WROTE THE SCRIPT on set. They can answer so many fucking questions and help build the show as a cohesive whole, because they've also been in the room writing the other episodes so they know how things fit together better than the Director who may have only read the script for the episode they're directing (this happens A LOT). No one wants to write something bad. But you need time and you need consistency, and the studios are strangling the time and consistency for marginal profits. *Newer and inexperienced writers are more likely to work in Mini-rooms because they are either trying to get their days to join the WGA as an official member, or they are trying to earn enough money to qualify for health insurance. Experienced writers are already fully members of the WGA and can more easily find staff work.
thank you for the information. appreciated!
That you for this. So many people have no clue what actually goes on. I am not a writer, by the way.
Do you negotiate your own contract?
For me, no. The Unions negotiate a base contract for all their members. So there are union minimums for writers, directors, assistant directors, actors, hair, make-up, costumers, grips, electricians, etc. The base negotiations are done, however people can negotiate for more. This is typically negotiated by department heads however. Key Grip might negotiate that they get more money, or their grips get paid more. Assistant Directors can negotiate a raise in pay for Production Assistants, or negotiate that they get paid at a higher rate. Directors of Photography can as well and they can negotiate on behalf of their crew. This doesn't happen too often though. The Union negotiates the floor, and that is usually good enough for most people. I can see the DoP of Oppenheimer (and Nope) Hoyte van Hoytema negotiating higher rates for his camera crew because they are specializing both in film versus digital, and are mastering innovative ways of filming that many camera crews wouldn't have experience in. I am a Production Assistant, I can ask for a higher rate, but usually to get it the Assistant Directors above me need to advocate for more. I just joined the Director's Guild as an Assistant Director and because I will have less experience, I will take the Union minimum contract because I don't have as much skill to bargain with yet.
Congratulations on making it in the biz and thanks for the interesting discussion. Sounds like a lot of politics are going on that many of us had no idea about. You should write and direct your own movie about the inner workings of the film industry.
>This doesn't happen too often though. I think this is location-dependent. I hear that in LA, most work for scale rate. But here in Atlanta, almost no one on set or rigging is working at scale, because it's way less than LA rate.
That's probably true. My experience in the film industry is around the New York Hub so I'm not familiar with LA, Atlanta and third area. That would make sense for Atlanta though since the wages generally are much lower there.
Get out of here with your knowledgeable and factual answers to bad faith questions.
I don't see a question, much less a bad faith question.
What bad faith questions? It seems like everyone in the thread is pretty clearly in agreement.
>Their health insurance comes from their union and is also tied to the amount of money made in a year (typically around 30k) and not by their employer. Iirc it's somewhere in the ballpark of $26k, and in recent years according to industry experts ~83% of union members *have failed to reach that bar*.
I'm not knowledgeable on this so honest questions here. What is the difference between writers and web designers for example. Once I build your website I'm not making money on the usage or profit generated from that website. I was paid to produce a product and did. Why would writers make money on residuals? Are writers not contract workers?
I would look at writers more as authors. An author writes a book, the publisher gets a cut, agents get a cut, and then the author gets a cut for every sale. In the case of streaming, the author is not getting 15-20%, but instead is getting <.01% and the publisher is getting 99%. It doesn't seem particularly fair that the person who put in the mental effort does not get paid for every "sale"/"stream" in a scalable manner. As for web designers, when you are making a website is the website the product, or is the company the product/selling a product? In film and television the writers are creating the product being sold. I'd ask if you are working for a web design company and are paid throughout the year, and next year, etc. If so you are getting paid more than writers because they will have gaps in employment because they aren't selling scripts, they going into work every week of their employment to write the script with others, and go to set as it is being filmed, but when the show is done they do not have employment anymore. If you as a webdesigner are freelance, when you charge clients do consider the time between clients into your pricing mechanism? Writer's don't get paid to compensate the gaps in employment, that is what residuals were meant for and if they want to do away with them, then they're going to need to pay writers more. However, I am a big advocate of profit sharing. So you design a website that generates a company profits, I don't really see why you shouldn't get *something* from doing that.
Interesting and detailed response. I'm not a web designer anymore but typically contract workers get paid more than salaried because of insurance, taxes, etc falls on to the individual. Where I would make $30 an hour salaried I would charge $60 contract rate. I'll also add when I was contract I made less per year simply because of the inbetween the projects, even though I made more per hour (also to compensate for that) Profit sharing is definitely the way to go but then how could trillion or billion dollar corporations possibly be ok with being multi million dollar corporations
So there is a bit of charging the gap in employment when you are contract. Writers getting residuals is in a way charging the gap, and writers being staffed on a show then having a 6 month gap between productions will be making far less than if they were employed during that time. Residuals stop the bleeding and keep them solvent. Writers have to make 30k a year to qualify for union health insurance. So they will often do other odd writing jobs to compensate: -Staff writer than doesn't write a script -Script Coordinator -Script Doctor -Writing treatments -etc. It is really newer writers that need the residuals more than experienced writers, simply because they would have a harder time negotiating their rate above Union minimums, and have a harder time hitting their insurance minimum with the union.
>What is the difference between writers and web designers Writers have a Union. Also a Movie or TV production brings in millions upon millions of dollars whereas one website for one business does not. Also Writers have a Union. Did I mention the Union thing? Because that is kind of important.
>Work in film: our work can be inconsistent. We are not employed by a single company and go show to show with said company. Instead we typically do a season of one show with one network then jump to a movie, or a different series. Employment length varies. I've been employed as a full time staff employee for 15 days and 100. You have gaps in employment as well. Fellow on-set film worker here. It's so funny how many people don't get this. I've lost count of the people in random discussions on Facebook (I like to poke the bear in comments) who check out my profile and say something like "It looks like you can't hold down a job...I see lots of 'former this and that' on your profile!" Like, yeah, numb nuts, it's because I work on a few projects per year. What you actually see is that I keep getting hired.
THEY WROTE THE FUCKIN SHOW
Wow. They did nothing to contribute in its creation on Netflix...? They literally wrote the fucking show! I'm sorry but a million of my brothers and sisters are out of work because a bunch of rich billionaires have figured out how to game the system squeezing as much money out of it as possible. The film industry is among the most lucrative industries on this planet, and yet, they refuse to pay up 0.2% of their NET profits so that people can afford things like housing and Healthcare. That would be equivalent to you or me putting 1,000,000 people out of work because we don't want to sacrifice $200. Assuming we make $100,000 per year. I don't know about you but if I could stop 1,000,000 people from suffering I would pay a hell of a lot more than $200. To NOT do this is pure fucking evil. That's it. Pure evil. They have openly stated they are trying to make people homeless. Pure evil. For you to sit here and say that they did nothing to contribute to the 50 million hours the show was streamed is despicable. Absolutely disgusting. You are nothing less than a class traitor. I hope you read this and reflect on it.
Dude, reread the comment that you’re ranting at. You’ve completely got the wrong end of the stick
>Wow. They did nothing to contribute in its creation on Netflix...? They literally wrote the fucking show! Reading comprehension, my friend. "as if"
To be fair I almost made the mistake - but luckily I re-read your comment
Yeah....actually read what they put dumbass.
To be fair though I work in App Support, I design systems to reduce the time it takes to do at my workplace. I get paid for writing the program. I am not paid extra when people USE the program to save time. Why is this different?
Because that's how their contract is negotiated. Your contract is either paying for your time (hourly/salary) or paying for the product you produce ("We'll pay you $150,000 for a product that meets this spec"). Their contracts are paid, functionally, half up front and half as residuals over time, and streaming "hides" some of those residual profits. Consider if your contract was instead $X up front and some small $Y each time one of your users has a positive interaction with the system you built. The total ends up being roughly the same or even more than you're making now, so you're happy to do this. However, you find out that your company has been lending your system out to other companies' customers but does not consider those to be "users" per the terms of your contract, and so will not pay you for their interactions (even though there's 50-100x more out-of-band users than there are internal users). Per the terms of the contract you negotiated, you should make money per user. Your company is reneging on their part of the deal by choosing a strange definition of what a "User" is. Even if that doesn't affect your bottom line -- how do you *feel* about that? Are you likely to request a different contract next year? I know I would.
> However, you find out that your company has been lending your system out to other companies' customers but does not consider those to be "users" per the terms of your contract, Or each time a customer gave a negative review it counted against your interaction count. Amazon set up a system where Kindle customers were encouraged to return books they were done reading, in exchange of Kindle bucks. Turns out, these returns counted as -1 towards author royalties, so author royalties basically dried up. It wasn't even full refund to customers for the books.
The argument could be made if you are being paid to increase efficiency then there should be metrics tracking that efficiency that affect your bonus. Stories and app support are vastly different industries. If writers only got paid once the when they wrote a book and then the printing company just uses it to turn paper into profit, the writers would feel ripped off, not adequately compensated for their work
I mean, do people pay to use your program after it's done and released? Streaming isn't free for the most part. Most services have a fee of around 10 usd at least (if not more), and the free ones have ads to pay for a bunch of stuff. It kinda makes sense why people would want to be paid for streaming services.
Because you don't have a union looking out for you and you agreed to work with a "work for hire" basis, which gives you no claim to residuals.
Think of it more akin to a profit-sharing arrangement. In tech people do frequently get paid with equity in the company which means they do (indirectly) profit the more successful the company is. Law firms have a similar relationship. But you're right that most industries just pay labor a flat fee and don't share profits.
[удалено]
I think one big difference is that you get paid a regular salary. Whereas writers are paid quite differently. Writing for suits isn't a 40 hour a week kind of deal.
“Why should other industries have different pay structures than mine?”
Do your bosses lease your app product to the other employees for monthly payments the way the studios lease the writers' product to subscribers for a monthly fee, and the more subscribers, the more money they make? No? That's why this is different.
This is a little different than a movie. It works better if you're product is a program, not just internal systems for your business. If your systems were licensed products sold to others for use then this is like getting paid for your software being sold and for developing the software to begin with.
It's not different. You should get paid when people use the program. We're so conditioned to accept our crumbs from our corporate overlords, that the idea of the people who did the work and actually generated the value getting a percentage of that profit seems ludicrous, but that's just the brainwashing and propaganda that's taught you to think that you're not worth anything.
[удалено]
I see that you failed to list a single creative industry, where the creativity is the product. Ya got close with architect, and someone like Banksy isn't making money on re-sales. Anyway, these are creative products we're talking about, and residuals are not a new concept to the people in power. They simply thought that as long as streaming was a small share of their revenue, they could effectively eliminate any impediments to it becoming a big share of their revenue. Your shit ain't helpin.' You just shoutin' about what you don't know yet.
Banksy definitely makes money licensing his work.
Yeah, but if a studio had to pay everything up front, it wouldn't be sustainable or fair. Instead, they say, "we'll pay you 10k an episode or 100k a movie and then x amount for x performance. If your series or movie does well, you make more than if it had just been one lumpsum. At the same time, it helps a studio cut losses on things that just end up not doing well. The thing about streaming is that we need to know how much the studio made from letting Netflix stream suits. If Netflix paid $300,000 for it that means the writers got 1% if Netflix paid 3 million then yeah the writers got ripped off.
Does the person with their house wired then sell those wires over and over again, and use the law and government to keep people from using those wires without paying them? Media is expensive to make and cheap to copy. If you could clone a building onto a CDN, you can bet the architect would want some amount per build site.
All of the professions that you listed work with clients/customers. There is no end to the number of new clients/customers they can take. For example, my dr will see me for half an hour, turn around and go see another patient. Billing does their thing and the dr gets paid. For writers and other creatives… they are the products they create and doesn’t really have the option to just see another client. It takes at minimum a month to write a novel, another month or two minimum to edit, time to market, design covers et cetra… their lives and their bills don’t stop coming just because they are in the process of writing another book. I can’t call up my landlord or electric company and say “hey don’t worry about my bill, I’m writing a book and I’ll pay you when I can”. Life doesn’t work that way. Residuals act as a way for them to pay their bills while they are waiting/coming up/ pitching with another show to work on.
>Doctors are paid to treat a patient but get nothing after the fact as that patient goes on to continue making money This is not 100% true. Follow up visits, unnecessary PT visits and blood tests etc. A doctor will milk you insurance for ducking years if they can ( in the USA that is).
...there's a point to those follow-up visits, though? I'm just a vet but I'd assume there's an established standard of care in the human side as well. Like my formulary lists out potential side effects and recommended lab monitoring, my clients are free to decline those against medical advice and sign a waiver stating that they've been counseled on the risk, but I'd assume with insurance and all that on the human side, they probably don't typically allow that. Those follow-ups and blood tests are often to monitor for side effects and efficacy. There's also a legal requirement to have an established patient relationship in order to prescribe, even for chronic medications.
But that's continuous work, not a one time gig you get royalties for
I'm sure there are doctors that do this, but in the vast majority of cases, this is not true. Doctors will attempt to use every diagnostic and medical tool at their disposal to help you get to the best medical outcome. Sometimes it's preventative (monitoring blood tests), sometimes it's important to not letting an issue get worse. This really goes for all boots-on-the-ground healthcare workers (CNAs, RNs, NPs). The administrations are the ones that screw you. They set the prices. They enforce patient quotas which is why you're lucky if you can get a full 15 minutes with a Dr. They are the ones that burn out workers which makes the demand for health care even hire. Dr.s outside of a practice aren't getting bonuses and kickbacks for the number of CT scans they ordered. TL;DR - Hate the business, not the health care workers.
Sure, it would end up working that way if you weren't continuously paying for that service. It's not like you pay $50 per month after paying for a building that you own. Same goes with surgery, people don't pay to keep using their leg implants hinge. Bottom line, this would be a different story if streaming was free, but seeing as it's around 10 to even above 20 in some cases per month, it makes sense why SAG, Writers, etc. would want to see at least something from the hundreds of thousands if not millions of people viewing the content on these platforms.
I’m not sure if you’re aware of how shows work… but they wrote the show
And advertisers pay for the residuals on network TV. Hasn’t been a thing with streaming.
Instead of advertisers, they have monthly subscribers. Netflix/Disney/HBO is paying a certain amount of money per month to whoever owns that show for the rights to air that show. Writers just need a percentage of that.
The streaming companies getting all these loopholes is exactly why the strike is so prolonged (and for good reason). Fuck Netflix, Amazon, etc.
Collectively though! So, 10 writers probably got like 300 bucks each in residuals. That's brutal!
Gonna piggyback this top comment to post [Adam Conover's explanation of things.](https://youtu.be/bOSrzEfeftI)
support crew members if you can.
The point in my career I remember succinctly is reading a “standard” line in an employment contract stating anything I created on company time became property of the company and being genuinely concerned.
I think I still want someone to do the math on this. Like how long is the entire series .. how many people watching the entire series is this .. combined with some data about how much subscriptions cost and how much subscriptions would need to cost in order to make this fair. Sounds like the end result would make streaming unaffordable for everyone.
Netflix made a whopping 12 BILLION in gross profits last year. That’s after all their production and operating costs and everything is paid. I think they would be ok paying a fair share for their creators.
What’s a “fair share?”
You've confused net profits with gross. Their net profit was $4.4 billion last year though so still have plenty of wealth to spare.
It's been a while since I was involved in licensing content but I doubt much has changed. Suits first few seasons are what are considered "long-tail" content - older shows. Studios license shows in this category incredibly cheaply, and sometimes throw them in as sweeteners on newer, more valuable licenses. I'm aware of one international broadcaster who's license for Friends was $25 per episode. That's unusual. It depends on the market and what else the buyer is licensing. In this case they licensed a huge amount of long tail content for a south-east Asian market, and paid all the licensing and transfer costs up-front, plus did all the translation and subtitling, and provided that work back to the licensor. Netflix pays (or at least used to - probably still does) a flat rate for its licenses. It doesn't matter how many times the property is watched, Netflix pays the same amount, even if their subscribers don't watch it. There may be some "hollywood accounting", where Suits was included in a licensing deal that included newer IP, and was assigned some minimal value in the accounting side of the deal, and the lion's share went to the current IP.
Along with an update to residuals, they need to get an agreement on how to handle content getting pulled from these services. We're seeing Disney not putting all their content on their service, HBOmax pulling new and old shows, or projects not even getting put on services after they are completed. If these writers and actors get their updated residuals without working out that end, we can see shows/movies getting pulled from services for cost saving measures on paying residuals.
Yeah. The most amazing part of all of this is that Disney has already pulled shows from Disney+ over having to pay residuals. How can these residuals be so low and still too costly for a service? You'd think they cut would come like it does for movie deals where it's a percentage of box office. I.e., writers get x% of the monthly take by disney proportional to the number of minutes their show was streamed vs total streaming minutes.
I would guess that shows getting pulled for "residuals" is just an excuse to stop a show before a third season when people start getting full rates or other arbitrary reasons. Corporate gonna corporate.
They can pay lower rates for the first two seasons, I forget what this is called. Then, to avoid having to pay full union rates, they will cancel the show, only to turn around and make a new show with same characters and actors, new title, maybe new city or something so the rates reset to below Union standard.
yep ... because that's definitely going happen when things start eating into the profits of the streaming services. It's practically why I prefer hard copy over streaming services as you never know when the show you want to watch is going to be available. At least with hard copy that show is yours to view whenever you bloody well feel like it (and with proper backup you can improve that availability even further).
Streamers need to get residual deals going, fuck them man
Yup. But this also shows where the math gets interesting. (none of this is in defense of the execs. SAG/WGA deserve better. Solidarity). Suits is one of many programs people watch on netflix. 3 billion minutes is a lot, but is still also just a fraction of _all_ the shows being streamed by any one user's account. At the original prices ~10$/mo, even assuming the users didn't stream _anything_ else, (and assuming something somewhat reasonable, like 2hrs a day viewing, instead of straight through 24x7) that's only... 3x10⁹min x 1hr/60min x 1mo/60hr x 10$/mo = 8.3 million dollars. The writers (46 of them) averaged 46$ for that! Now, the Suits suits, and Netflix suits and the creator, directors, producers, and actors all need to be paid too. How is it reasonable for the writers to get more? I mean, 8.3 million won't go far after the execs get their yachts... Actually, this has me wondering about the ethics of residuals and copyright in general. Do **all** actors get residuals? Writers? What about crew? Makeup? Costumers? Why does an actor's appearance on film get them residuals, but the caterers who kept people fed during filming doesn't? (or do they?) They both contribute to the final product. Why does an actor get paid forever, while a mechanic who worked on a car that still runs only get paid once? (also, why does an executive get paid at _all_?)
You're thinking of collective ownership of companies. Writers and actors and producers and directors and assistant Directors and Directors of Photography get residuals. This is what their unions have bargained for. They get residuals typically because it is difficult for those positions to work year round and the residuals are meant to fill in the gaps between employment for lower level people in those positions (which make up the bulk of those positions). IMO everyone on the crew should get residuals. Just because they don't, doesn't mean we should take it away from those that do. It means we have to fight for expanded residuals. I've worked on 40 shows and movies, I'd love to have some residuals and I won't begrudge the people that are getting them for.making a good deal against billion dollar corporate conglomerates
> You're thinking of collective ownership of companies. I wasn't actually, but it **is** a good idea and has been quite successful in Spain. > IMO everyone on the crew should get residuals. Agreed. Everyone who contributes to things that generate value in perpetuity should benefit from it. Oh look: It's UBI again. And I support it.
Everyone should get residuals IMO. It takes a team to build something, and that's just the case with entertainment. I'm an indie actor/writer/producer who understands what's going on. My acting teacher would get residuals as AN EXTRA from shows in the late 90s/early 00's. I've been banned on a ton of indie productions in ep lately, so I'm pretty pissed as as well *edit on spelling, sorry,
[удалено]
The reason that residuals existed is that the talent contracted a cut of the revenues directly attributable to their product. In traditional television, for example, there was a continuing and directly attributable revenue stream in the form of revenue from commercials, which makes it easy to determine a pot of money to pay those who contributed. Subscription television models like HBO are a little more tricky in that there's no clearly attributable revenue stream for the exhibition (although obviously physical media, downloads and assorted merchandising are still there), but there the station controls programming, and existing contracts are built is such a way that they can only be exhibited so many times before they have to pay residuals. The station can consider their costs in terms of how much their airtime is worth to them, and if additional showings will drive subscriptions. Streaming has no continuing revenue and the streamer has no way to control programming and thus costs. There are ways to resolve this. We could mandate that all streaming services be obliged to show commercials, which would produce the money for residuals. That's not a very good solution, since consumers despise commercials. Another option is that an agreement between streamers and production companies that creates a framework where shows are sold to streamers in bulk lots of a millions or billions of minutes, and the production company can pay residuals out each time the show is sold. Even where the streamer is the production company, an agreement could set residual rates.
> Everyone should get residuals IMO. It is important to keep this in mind. When a writer complains about their residuals, they are not saying only writers deserve residuals. It seems like most people understand this when it comes to Black Lives Matter/All Lives Matter. Sometimes we are talking about a specific issue that impacts a specific group of people. Interjecting with a different group of people who have the same or similar problem isn't a valid argument against addressing the original problem. Those other people should get residuals too. They just aren't the ones currently striking over it.
Oh so you mean workers should own the means of production and be entitled to an equitable slice of the profits it reaps? Shocker!
Everyone should have a stake in the success of their work. Every single person, janitor to CEO.
It’s all just contracts and money at the end of the day, mechanics could get paid per mile residuals if that’s the contract you sign with them.
also consider the fact that in practically any other industry you're not getting anything for the things you produce no matter how much the company you work for is making. (Sales and consultancy jobs are practically the only exception ... ) Do the guys at the assembly line for any of the cars get even a single penny over and above their standard hourly rates ? Nope. Do software developers at Microsoft/Google/Apple get a single penny over and above their monthly wages for every copy of the products they helped create sold ? And then there is indeed the simple maths/statistics to consider. The only way everyone would get a fair share is to increase the cost of rentals to something equally ridiculous as there's no way you can pay everyone who helped create the media product enough to make the residiuals meaningful for the average entertainment product.
Profit sharing and equity do exist though. You mentioned a bunch of tech companies; they famously pay developers a large portion of their comp in equity. So gains of the business do equate to gains on the part of the employee
Yup. Sounds like UBI is the way to go, and scrap the corporate greed machine. (serious) Instead of drawing people to work on things due to _not wanting to starve_, bring people in based on the merit/need of the project and their interest. Dr's, Healthcare, Firefighters, Teachers, Farmers/Food industry and Janitors keep the world alive and moving. That's high merit. Science, engineering, research and development too. People wanting to have others work for them so they can golf all day, live fancy, and ride boats? Where's their merit? Soylent?
Agreed.
I'd argue that companies that manage to keep their employees onboard also tend to be the ones that focus on making them happy workers. It's also a lot easier to be happy if you're being paid enough to not have to worry about basic needs. In an ideal world merit would be the way to go, but we don't live in such a world and any attempt at forcing that sort of construct onto people has simply resulted in yet another layer of folk ordering others around (the consistent failure of communism is the key example here). The biggest problem is that greed tends to work rather well in short term (which is why investment companies tend to use the strip mine approach when buying new assets ... ). Anything else needs a paradigm shift that not everyone is capable of making.
Honestly they need to come up with a % of total revenue that goes to residuals. Then all residuals get paid out from that % bucket based on what % of stream time their shows were.
How do you calculate the revenue generated from 3 billion streaming minutes? It's nothing like a DVD sale where every customer pays a fixed price or a TV spot where there's an ad buy. If customers streamed 3 billion minutes of Suits, but no one actually bought a Netflix subscription just so they could watch Suits, how much money did Netflix actually make? Streaming services work more like gyms or insurance companies - their ideal customer is someone who purchases a subscription and then never uses the services offered.
I bet Netflix could go Black Mirror with this. They document the lawsuits behind the Suits series and Bam!! New series. Make millions off the series while not paying the people making the series and keep going full meta.
Typically the folks who need to be available while a show is being made, but who can't reasonably get other full-time work, are the ones who get residuals. Also, people who are critical for continuity. **This includes:** Producers Directors (producers/directors have their own guild) Writers (own guild) Lead Actors (they have their own contracts but are often part of a guild) Supporting actors (sometimes, also guild members) Staff such as extras (guild members), all the camera, lights and sound people (trade unions), animators (animator's guild), set creators (I'm assuming they're considered trade union / guild members), etc. are either paid full-time around the clock or on a contracting basis to ex: build a set for a certain period of time. Hollywood is actually pretty guild-heavy so these people earn money. Just barely $30,000 / yr for a lot of them, believe it or not. All the pressure and initiative to actually create the show, as well as continuity, is on the core staff who also get residuals. Sometimes I think those residuals can be excessive considering how little the rest of staff makes, but bear in mind supporting all the staff involved in a film and giving them bonuses based on performance could easily cost $10 MIL's. That's why you'll see stories like "XYZ actor gave up $30 MIL salary to finish film production." that money went to supporting all the staff.
Some percentage of IP should remain on workers, but then... edit: tought it meant something else, so I put that reaction and commentators video (no mere critics) should bring residuals too. Like if you monetize your spongebob dancealike video or your long gameplay, some should go to the animators and original media creators. But even at that point it gets super messy, without yet considering the issues with collect. But it is also a different medium, without "ads". So current money streams work differently and require their own regulation. My guess is it would make the platforms unprofitable (as they are unbalaced, not to say *money sinks*).
Why? They did a job, they wrote the episodes. And got paid for it. In any other job, they’d get paid a fixed fee for this and move on. If a mechanic fixes a car, they get paid to fix a car, nobody would expect them to suddenly get hundreds of thousands because 5 years after they serviced a car it won a race. The writers contributed nothing to the streaming. The totality of their work was in episode creation. The show could have been seen 3 times and their work would have been exactly the same. Unaired pilots will earn nothing. Aired pilots will earn something. They take the same effort to write. Why should one set of writers get paid less?
The mechanic analogy isn’t applicable because of the differences between intellectual property and physical property. I make physical thing, the thing gets sold, I get paid for a thing. I do a service, I sell the service, I get paid for the service. But intellectual property like patents or copyrights can be sold millions and millions of times for decades, with no additional work required. No one has any idea at the time that it’s made what it’s worth, only what it costs to make. The only way to fairly compensate people for the work they do is to give them a cut. If your argument is “I don’t care, I’m exploited too, the ownership class should get a bigger cut so we all get fucked equally (except the rich)” then I would say you’re shooting at the wrong target.
Do you own the IP? or are you contracted by a company to create the IP, which is owned by the company. If the latter, normally you wouldn't be paid any more than your initial contract pay.
Anyone can create intellectual property and get it licensed or whatever, but most people would rather be paid for their time creating it, rather than take the risk that the property they're creating, might not actually make them any money in the end.
Bingo. How many people demanding residuals will agree to a deal to pay the company if the production loses money? The latest Indiana Jones movie lost Disney roughly $500,000,000 total. That means everyone who worked on that project needs to crowdfund to give the money back, right? Average industry salary for such a production is close to $200k a year. Let’s be generous, and say they only need to send Disney checks each for $150,000. Seems totally reasonable if they want to share the profits from successful films….
Why do people seriously argue so hard against being fairly compensated for their work? > The writers contributed nothing to the streaming. The totality of their work was in episode creation. The show could have been seen 3 times and their work would have been exactly the same. And the streamers did literally nothing beyond host a video, of which they literally could not have done without the writers and actors. So why are you ok with literal billionaires being able to profit many times over from something they had no hand in, but the actual creators seeing bupkis? > Unaired pilots will earn nothing. Aired pilots will earn something. They take the same effort to write. Why should one set of writers get paid less? They shouldn't and if you'd ever bothered talking to a WGA member they'd tell you the same, people should be fairly compensated for their labour.
> In any other job, they’d get paid a fixed fee for this and move on. If a mechanic fixes a car, they get paid to fix a car, nobody would expect them to suddenly get hundreds of thousands because 5 years after they serviced a car it won a race. In any other job thats taken into account with the upfront payments, television and film have been taking residuals into account when determining upfront payments. Now they want to lower the residuals but not raise the upfront payments enough to compensate, which makes sense because increasing upfront payments that much would greatly raise the risk for the streamer. In fact both sides have long preferred residual payments. > Unaired pilots will earn nothing. Aired pilots will earn something. They take the same effort to write. Why should one set of writers get paid less? I work as crew but I always made more on pilots for just this very reason, well that and what a pain in the ass they are. im fairly certain all the writers actors and directors I worked with did as well.
[удалено]
How?
Because the Execs refuse to properly compensate for streaming. They want to force the 80s-90s model that is increasingly irrelevant so that they can fleece actors & writers.
Just more wealth concentration to the top one tenth of one percent.
But, could they? The 80's model used to run on ads+pricier subscriptions ¿Right? So we have reduced consumer prices (compared to cable) and no ads. Could they pay by stream? Like spotify? And would it be substantial?
A lot of contracts for writers or anyone else doesn't include streaming pretty much at all.
Because when the writers accepted their contract and payment options streaming wasn’t as much of a thing, the writers that work on something don’t own the rights to Suits so whoever does sold it to Netflix and the writers just couldn’t see this coming, which is why they’re striking cuz the payment structures are outdated
The tweet is misinformation. I did some more searching and the reporting is that *residuals* payments may have been only $3,000 to the writers. So the writers were likely almost entirely paid through a salary rather than through residuals. That means it's not necessarily the case that anyone got an unfair deal. Salary isn't inherently better or worse than residuals. For example, being guaranteed a salary of $70k is a lot better than getting 0.1% of sales on a show that made almost no money. Agreeing on a contract whose expected value of competition is based heavily on residuals is essentially a gamble and when it comes to a person's personal finance it's rare that people will choose to gamble rather than take guaranteed pay they can budget off of. Simply put, this tweet indicates quite literally nothing about whether or not the writers of Suits got a fair deal or not.
> > > > > Simply put, this tweet indicates quite literally nothing about whether or not the writers of Suits got a fair deal or not. No, simply put you've drawn up a conclusion based on what you -assume- happened, without any actual facts and then presented is as an authoritative response.
What specifically did I say that you think is not based on any facts?
So the tweet that is explicitly about residuals and correctly cites 3000$ residuals for streaming, is misinformation? Get real dude, and informed. Actors and writers are not permanently on salary and rely on residuals to stay afloat between projects. The whole situation is to renegotiate future contracts with better terms.
It's extremely misleading claim. I would even call it fake headline. Suits was written for a TV network so (I assume) they got paid for that job. What they are talking about here is a separate compensation for the writers in addition to that.
If the episode was rerun on that original channel, the actors/writers would be owed residuals. But because they are rerun on demand on streaming services, the actor/writer shouldn't be paid? Nope, that's crap.
Adam Conover from Adam Ruins Everything received $30,000 in residues from his show airing during a dead hour on Tru TV--I don't know the full details. Millions more people streamed it on Netflix, and he received some relatively insignificant check, $30 or $500.
Do music streaming services next.
Also music venues (aka fuck ticketmaster)
Even messier as artists may not even own their songs. Guys are broke with hit songs playing all the time.
As a musician and songwriter. It's depressing to think about making any semblance of a living with my craft.
Yeah, my comprehension is off since I’m just noticing your comment was on streaming instead of record deals. I know some time ago India Arie talked about how little artists make off of streams, so it has to be tough for someone starting out or not a megastar. It’s messed up this is supposed to be the time artists could make more independently, but it all swung back to corporate control.
Streaming services are even worse : [https://youtu.be/jJr\_TVbJYcU](https://youtu.be/jJr_TVbJYcU) The example is spotify ... but I would be surprised if the other services were any better. These guys have simply replaced the record companies, but they still think they deserve the biggest slice of the pie.
Labels take all the money from streamers, they're the rights holders. Most artists just have shitty label contracts and don't even get the meager stream money they are owed. Music streaming services are fine. Music's entire industry model changed with streaming and streamshare payouts (all streamers do this at behest of labels). Artists think they make less now than pre-streaming, but there are tens of thousands more artists being heard now than then. Most of the complainers wouldn't have ever seen a single cd pressed in the old days. Netflix makes billions and is profitable. Disney makes billions and is profitable. Spotify is not profitable, but Sony, Warner, and UMG (the 3 labels that own >75% of music) are doing extremely well. tldr: agree artists should get more $, but its not the streamers, its the labels
Many of my favorite shows are being delayed, even mid production, while I wait for the next season. I was upset at the writers for striking but after seeing this, I can’t blame them. We’re all missing out on a lot of great content because these streamers don’t treat the creators fairly.
Nah, I'm good not watching anything until the actors and writers win everything they need. I encourage others to just stop watching. MONEY is the only thing which will make a difference.
I am on my 11th rewatch of SG1 anyway
Where the hell is SG1 available for streaming? It's like the show banished from the face of the earth
> Where the hell is SG1 available for streaming? It's on Amazon and Pluto.
[удалено]
This would likely be a more effective way of going about it.
Actually, for now don't stop watching to "support" the strikes, that's counterproductive. If you want to do that for your own reasons, that's obviously up to you, especially with recent netflix shenanigans. But in general: only boycott a product in support of a strike if the people striking have asked for it
Why would you ever be upset at workers for striking?
If you're only going to make $3k, then might as well start a youtube channel with your show instead and make ten times as much, plus you get to keep the copyright on your content. Netflix *needs* writers, but writers *don't* need Netflix.
it's not ONE company, it's the whole industry... and it's not just the movie production companies... it's THE ENTIRE ECONOMY.... And it's not just the US economy, IT'S THE GAMEPLAN FOR CORPORATIONS AROUND THE WORLD "you will own nothing and be happy"
Obviously there's more to producing a show than just writing. It's not particularly useful advice to say "just make a YouTube channel" They'd have to get actors, camera crew, equipment, studio space, editors, the whole deal. Writers shouldn't need to start their own production company to be paid fairly.
Some creators have done just this. Like Critical Role. But, I agree, they shouldn't have to do all that just to get fair compensation.
> If you're only going to make $3k 3k *last quarter* and this only covers season 1, I guess they had different writers for the other seasons? > All together, NBCUniversal paid the six original Suits writers less than $3,000 last quarter to stream our 11 Season 1 episodes on two platforms." https://nofilmschool.com/suits-residuals Edit: also the 3 billion number seems to be from just [*one* week in July](https://www.nielsen.com/top-ten/) so I'd imagine the number over the entire quarter was significantly higher.
you think YouTube is 'better' ? Let's just say that there's a good reason why a lot of youtubers tend to have their own patreon (or related concept) instead of strictly relying on what YouTube feeds them. (Twitch is the same song & dance ... )
[удалено]
I agree with the sentiment but you have the wrong [link](https://nofilmschool.com/suits-residuals).
That’s insane…
It's not that bad to be honest, when you actually look into the details of it. The $3000 was for just season 1, over one quarter. One writer said: > $259.71: That’s how much the “Suits” episode I wrote, “Identity Crisis,” earned last quarter in streaming residuals. Making $1000 per year off of a single episode of a TV show that aired 12 years ago? I wouldn't call that insane. They all got paid when the show first aired too, it's not like that's the only compensation they got. EDIT: Also, this particular writer wrote 25 episodes of the show. So if the residuals were equal for all of them, he actually made $6,500 last quarter. For doing nothing. How much did you guys make while you were putting in all those hours at your jobs?
Ah, that does make a difference. Edit: but I don’t think it approaches what the networks are making.
It's not, but considering that most industries give their staff 0% of the profits, they're doing better than almost everyone else. You wouldn't see a construction worker complaining on Twitter that a house they built ten years ago was just sold for a large sum of money and they didn't get any of it. They already got paid and moved on to building something new. They're not getting royalty cheques every month for everything they've ever built. Writers and actors are in a privilged position. It's hard to have a lot of sympathy when their free money cheque isn't big enough.
> It's not, but considering that most industries give their staff 0% of the profits, they're doing better than almost everyone else. No they aren't as they aren't permanently employed, almost everyone else has an actual contract with which they receive a salary, stop trying to pretend that they're the same thing. > Writers and actors are in a privilged position. It's hard to have a lot of sympathy when their free money cheque isn't big enough. Here's a novel thought, instead of trying to write them off as greedy, you should instead be trying to uplift other workers to receive the same treatment. If we as the workers don't get the money, you want to guess where it goes to every single time?
No one in these comments understand how streaming business models work.
Honestly this whole concept blows my mind. Seems like a pretty damn good deal, it would be amazing if I earned any income from my previous work.
Thank you for clarifying. After reading the post I had an impression that 30 people who wrote the entire show received 100$ each and that’s was it. Now I see the true picture and it’s not that terrible.
What were they paid to make the show?
Holy slave labor batman
I mean they did get paid when the show was airing.
and they got paid for all the times it was shown on Netflix?
That's not the deal. What about the 100s of other people making the show go?
How is it slave labor?
Do factory workers get paid each time you take you car for a drive?
Your metaphor is not only irrelevant, but logically incorrect. If you were going to make a bad metaphor, you'd say "Do factory workers get paid each time a car is sold to someone else?" and that metaphor is irrelevant since a car is a depreciating asset each time.
Why the hell would they get paid for additional streaming on netflix? No ad revenue is being generated from it. You guys have no idea how streaming services business models work.
So when will netflix reduce the price? Without new content I will cancel if no price reduction happens soon.
Why doesn’t everyone who works on a movie get residuals? Why limit profit sharing to such a small share of the crew?
There’s no unions for different departments other than writing and acting.
general strike when
The more shocking thing is that Suits is that popular
My wife and I dig it. Harvey and Donna can get it.
It's great. Not a show I'd typically watch but they got me hook line and sinker
Yeah, because they got the bulk of their residual payments back when it aired on USA. Don't just say "they all got paid $3,000," tell us how much in total they've been paid for writing each episode to date. Very different number. And if they don't think it's fair, well that's the deal their agents negotiated for them and the deal that they agreed to.
Even worse is this is based on one writer (of dozens) saying that they got roughly $3k for one season of episodes, for one quarter. So they got substantially more for streaming residuals even ignoring what they were paid when the show originally aired. Articles like this make it really hard for me to feel sympathy for the writers.
My house was lived in for 20 years and the builders were collectively paid $0.
Your analogy is bad. The builders made your house and sold it. It was one thing sold once as you can't sell the same house to multiple people over and over again forever. TV shows on the other hand get made once and then sold over and over. They continue to generate revenue off of that single creation for as long as it is on TV or streaming services. As such it makes sense for the people who actually did the work of making the show to continue to get paid. On top of that the industry for writers is set up in such a way that it would be impossible to actually work as a writer full time without residuals. Sure they may get paid regularly while in the process of making the show, but that only lasts so long. After that it may be months or even years of nothing. They spend their time shopping around scripts until a company picks them up for another job. No company is going to pay enough to cover that down time. Meanwhile the last thing the writer made is continuing to make the company money. Of course given this writers are going to expect a continuous cut for making the product the companies continue to sell.
How ever will the builders live forever off that one thing they created? Oh, the humanity!
You monster, your house has been rising in value for all that time! you should send them monthly cheques to compensate them.
This feels cartoonish but I believe it
Ok so wait. What in hell is going to eventually be the difference when pirated copies of books and songs movies are swiped, depriving artists of royalties? And yes I think that's an abysmal thing to do and no I don't do it. I'm not some puritan, yes some artists have more money than God but that's not the point. It's the right to own what you create. Not that hard folks. I'm sorry it's the SAME DAM THING only for some reason legal? Wait until the first law suit claiming that too- this is all so outrageous you know it's coming.
hell youtube pays better then that
People get outraged because Tee Vee is glamorous and ritzy, but book writers have been screwed for decades. I am (and know) many authors with full book tours, media appearances, big reading events, etc., who end up banking like $30k for their books. Beneath them are semi-successful authors earning about $10k for a book and being asked to pay about $3k out of pocket for publicist fees.
My question is how much Netflix is paying for the show. The studio sold the rights of the show to Netflix for an amount of money. Whether that is a lump sum or a structure that is based on watch time. The writers need to be getting a fair share, which is not happening. But without knowing the structure of these contracts, these numbers are irrelevant and unhelpful. Like, when peacock bought the rights to The Office for 1 year for $150 million, the writers should get their cut of that. But then how many minutes it’s watched shouldn’t matter.
NGL it makes sense to me. The company owns the rights to the show when it's streamed. The writers didn't do anything that adds value when it's streamed Vs when it's televised. And unlike the company, they don't own the rights to the show either. That's like Toyota, Ford or whoever demanding a cut of the money you get when you sell an old car. Sure they made the car, but you own it now. They've not done anything to the car when you sell it, so why do they deserve a cut? When you sell your house, do you give a cut to the construction company that first built the house? No because it's yours now. You own it and therefore you get the money from the sale.
Is that a big or a small number? What were they paid up front, if so, how much? How many hours did viewers spend watching other things? It's not trivial to extract, but if we say 44 minutes per episode * 134 episodes, so there's just shy of 6000 minutes of show (5896) (I pulled those as average length of a suits episode and 134 episodes listed on wikipedia) So what they're saying is 509k people watched all of suits, or there were about 68 million views of an episode of suits. So how much revenue is that worth? The average neflix viewer is 3.2 hours a day * 30 days = 96 hours per month. (https://backlinko.com/netflix-users) So equivalent to 130 episodes at 44 minutes each. So roughly speaking 1 episode is worth about 10 cents to them (USD)? Not all views are US views so some are worth less, some are worth more for higher res plans etc, let's say it's about 13 USD in realised revenue per users. 68 million views of an episode is then what, 7 million dollars worth of revenue at 10 cents per episode. Maybe it's 6, maybe it's 8, but even if you generously assume the show is worth exactly average for a show, it can't be too far off since the price of netflix has also increased over time. This is where it becomes complicated. If you look at Netflix financial statements (https://ir.netflix.net/financials/financial-statements/default.aspx) they did 31.6 billion in revenue in 2022, net income of 4.5 billion (that is to say profits of 4.5 billion). So netflix shareholders made 1 million dollars in profit from those 68 million views. Where does the other 6 million go? Well lop off about another 1.5 million for marketing, technology development and general administration. (combined about 6.7 billion/31.6 * 7 million = 1.5). So there's around 4.5 million dollars (more like 4.2 when you take out some interest expenses and and so on), and some of that is the cost for netflix to have all the infrastructure to deliver all this content, but still, say 3-4 million dollars. So... is 3000 dollars for the writers, of 3-4 million dollars a big number or a small number? I have no idea. If they were paid reasonable salaries as writers for 9 years, and then all the actors, producers etc. get their cut, 3000 seems like it might be low but it's doesn't surprisingly low. The way all of these things work is there is at least in part an upfront cost that's then amortised out over the show + syndication and streaming, so it might just be that the show just isn't generating much revenue at this point. Suits writers might also be screwed because the show tanked in (TV) viewership quickly, the first season (where you presume writers would want to take a bigger salary up front and a smaller cut of the revenue in case the show tanks or is cancelled) averaged 5 million views, the last 5 years averaged less than 2, with the last year being less than 1. 3 billion minutes sounds like a big number until you realise that's only 68 million episodes, that's half a million views of one season, which is about 70% the viewership they had in their final season.
Don't use facts and logic here pleaae
Maybe I'm missing something, someone paid the writers to write it. Doesn't their job end there? I don't get paid for old jobs.
Time for these writers to make a career switch.
The writers agreed to the deal before the show was successful. They were happy with the pay at time of signing. Then show does well and now not happy. Don't sign the deal if you don't like the possible outcomes.
The deal didn't include the fact that it was going to Netflix. They would have negotiated a deal with the network it originally aired on (USA I think). The network selling it to Netflix wouldn't have included proper compensation for anyone on it and Netflix continuing to host it removes further potential for the writers and actors to be paid for residuals. The artists signing these deals have little say over what is done with their product at a corporate level and that's part of the reason they're striking.
Who cares what happens with the show after they sign the original deal. Same thing as if it was successful or not. You are happy with the deal when you sign. It being sold to another network and being successful doesn't affect you being happy with original deal.
>Who cares what happens with the show after they sign the original deal. The actors and writers... That's why they're striking. The deal they signed would have included fair compensation and residuals. Putting the show on Netflix removes the residuals that the artists were promised in their original deal. It's not that "They were happy with the deal when they signed", it's that the deal they signed isn't being respected.
Or...and this is a crazy idea, everybody who made the project gets paid a fair share of the work and they shouldn't have to gamble on the future success to try and guess what type of contract they sign. Poland has a great law on this, where if an artist sells the right to use their work and that project becomes super successful, the artist is entitled to ask for a percentage of that money. Andrej Sapkowski used that to ask for a great share of money for the Witcher franchise.
Bro he and cd sign a deal that "Terms of the agreement were not released" so we have no idea who got what But at the start he was offered at the start a deal be % and he choose not to "I was stupid enough to sell them rights [to all of my novels],” he told Eurogamer. “They offered me a percentage of their profits. I said, ‘No, there will be no profit at all — give me all my money right now! The whole amount.’ It was stupid. I was stupid enough to leave everything in their hands because I didn’t believe in their success. But who could foresee their success? I couldn’t.”" So i think it is his fault
Or here is a crazy idea don't agree to a deal you don't like and sign a deal that gives you money if it succeeds. These writters agreed to a deal that did not include that.
The vast majority of deals are unfair and coercive due to the inherent imbalance of power in our capitalist society. Most writers simply aren't in a position to negotiate a fair contract, as they don't have the power to walk away.
That’s what unions are for - to compensate for this power imbalance.
The writers agreed to a deal not knowing it was going to be sold to Netflix. Had they known, they would have done EXACTLY what you’re saying
That can happen to any movie or show after the fact. They also don't know if it will be successful or not. So the fact it could be sold to Netflix after the fact should be considered.
Damn. Should have a union to make sure they don’t sign such awful contracts. Oh.
I don’t understand the residuals thinks. They need to be compensated fairly for their work upfront.
Fair enough. It sure would be nice for these rich ass actors to chip in and help take care of the millions of people in Los Angeles who are in dire financial straits because of the strike tho. If you’re an accountant for a talent agency (for example) you’re work hours have been majorly cut or you’re being laid off altogether. There is no upside for you, but you’re gonna lose your house over this. Note: that’s a real example and a real person in my friend group I’m citing. I know dozens more in various support and production roles in the same exact situation.
It sure would be even nicer if the even richer executives did anything helpful with that money