Forum - View topicAnswerman - Are Streaming Revenues Improving The Lives Of Animators?
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configspace
Posts: 3717 |
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I distinctly remember The Under The Dog producers quoted a figure of $7.4 million (or 7.6 million? somewhere in the mid-7 millions) for a 24 episode show when they where trying to find investors. So that figure of around $320,000 per episode average jives with what they said too. Animation ends up costing a lot of money even at the current low wages. Actually it's a given how many man hours are involved vs total budget. But it's not like any single entity is hugely profiting from that figure either. In an earlier Answerman article Justin cited another producer that it can take something like 10 or so years to recoup costs. It's basically the reason why production committees exist, rather than anime studios funding their own productions (which does happen but is rare). So that in the meantime, all the losses are spread out among many different companies and sponsors on the production committee. That anime cost figure however high it might seem, pales in comparison to American animation studios which are a hell of lot more expensive per man-hour, especially since most demand royalties and residuals. It's also ironic given the lower quality animation and animation demands for western 2D cartoons. I had cited several references in another thread before, but overall, positions in the Japanese professional/skilled economy by a native Japanese company pay a lot less than equivalent American positions. |
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HeeroTX
Posts: 2046 Location: Austin, TX |
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While I agree that that would be cool, I don't think most animators have the time to keep content flowing on a patreon. What WOULD be interesting is if a patreon could keep animator workloads down (pay from animating+patreon funds giving a comfortable living) thus likely raising pay as workers get tougher to find. But more likely, if "patreon animators" worked less they'd just be seen as less reliable and replaced with non-patreon animators. |
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relyat08
 Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
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I thought this was a more understood fact of how royalty payments work, but I guess not. I think maybe the confusion comes from the fact that people are still thinking of royalty payments and licensing payments as the same thing. Royalties are paid based on views. To give an example, I used to work in a similar field and the standard royalty payout was $0.03 per view. So someone watching that show was directly contributing $0.03 to that project. Everything you watch is directly contributed to. $0.03 may seem like a tiny amount of money, but just multiply that by a few million and see how much of an impact it can have, especially over the course of a long series, or just multiple episodes in general. Licensing is different. Those are upfront fees obviously paid to initially acquire something. Crunchyroll uses your monthly subscription to pay for everything the site does, more or less, so it is paying for both the $0.03 royalty per view you engage in, as well as the license payments they make. If you watch nothing, your subscription is only paying for licenses, but the more you watch, the more you are directly contributing to specific series. To clarify though, if you watch just one show, it's not like your entire subscription is going to that show. You're still only contributing $0.03 per view. Last edited by relyat08 on Fri Feb 23, 2018 3:30 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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jr240483
 Posts: 4390 Location: New York City,New York,USA |
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along as they get the income to do what they do best, its all that matters to me. however it will technically mean nothing since they aren't cracking down on those illegal streaming websites and torrent download websites. those sites like kiss anime have to be costing them serious revenue and their not doing something about it. its a problem they really need to get their hands on otherwise it will be a problem later on. especially for the US side cause well known english dub VO's are more or less leaving the industry and going to other places like exclusively voicing for video games since piracy isn't as frequent. |
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Compelled to Reply
 Posts: 358 |
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Going on a class warfare tirade doesn't help your argument. Frankly, going by your logic, American streaming services would actually squeeze Japanese companies involved in anime production further if they're part of any committees, worsening what are "deplorable" working conditions for animators, according to a few disgruntled people. Unfortunately, squeezing every cent out of something is the American way of doing business for quite some time now. I've seen shakedowns of big Western European and Japanese companies, and even many of our own that haven't "adapted." |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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That would make it a cartel, I believe, a condition in which a few major players in a business agree to a fixed price. Cartels have a reputation, regardless of industry (whether it be gasoline, drugs, or telecommunications), of being extremely hard to break, as any business that bucks the trend will fall under attack from or risk a hostile acquisition by one of the cartel members.
I believe that has already been tried. With some exceptions here and there (like Mr Osomatsu, and to a lesser extent, Pop Team Epic), the anime business has had a very hard time selling outside of its usual demographics. Either their marketing is bad, they've been judging the outside audiences wrong, or these potential viewers never had any interest in watching to begin with. I do believe it can be done on a wide scale, but everything has to go right for that to happen.
The game company that immediately comes to mind for me is Rovio. The reason why they merchandise and sold the rights for Angry Birds to pretty much anyone who asked and would pay money, though, was because the people who ran Rovio KNEW they'd be unlikely to come up with anything to match the success of Angry Birds...and as they've failed to make anything that could even catch on, the company shrank dramatically.
They become animators in an anime because this is what they really want to do, and they will take a low wage to do it. It's really the same deal with Hollywood: Until you advance far enough in, you won't be getting a living wage (or perhaps any wage at all, as major studios each have their own little armies of unpaid interns that, despite the law saying they have to be given educational opportunities, are mostly just used as unpaid labor). These are people very passionate about the line of work they've chosen to enter. They are essentially starving artists: They're not making a lot of money, but they have no intention to quit because they'd rather live without a lot of money than take a better-paying job they dislike. You know, the idea that "You get into this line of work not because you want to get rich; you get into this line of work because you like it." I don't see a lack of self-respect in that at all.
Devilman Crybaby definitely felt like the ind of show that could not have passed a production committee--or ANY sort of executive screening for an established company, for that matter. Netflix is currently in the phase in which they'll greenlight anything if it sounds interesting or different enough. The company's looking for its next big breakthrough hit. (Or its first, depending on how you look at it, but Orange Is the New Black has established itself pretty firmly.)
Like everything else though, unless the animators are selling those directly, there's no guarantee the money's going to mostly go to the animators. Or go to them at all.
I used to work at a thrift store, and people would ask why they have to pay for these items when we received them for no cost in the form of donations. So I would commonly tell them that we still have to pay for rent, gas, water, electricity, Internet, phone, insurance, security, legal fees, garbage disposal, equipment, transportation, and so forth. Most of the time, they realize that the place is paying a lot of costs they don't really notice. For other businesses, though, I sometimes see the inverse: Some people see the price of the raw materials and forget that, well, people have to be paid to turn those raw materials into something useful to the buyer.
Actually, that is exactly what might work: What Netflix is doing right now is rolling the dice and hoping to get the numbers they want. The Netflix people have a lot of money, not a lot of hit shows, and not a lot of experience in picking people,so they're doing the only thing they CAN do, which is to greenlight risky projects and hope the risk pays off. This has had precedent in the past with networks. The biggest example is The Simpsons, in which FOX, trying to elevate to the big three of CBS, ABC, and NBC, put out a whole bunch of TV shows, and The Simpsons was the one that did exactly that. Other examples I can think of are Comedy Central with The Daily Show and South Park, Cartoon Network with Dexter's Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls (that's what the Cartoon Cartoon project was for: To let a lot of new and established talent make something and then let the viewers vote), and the Sci-Fi Channel (now SyFy) with Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica.
Lower quality? They're different standards. Anime is more geared toward detail per individual frame; western animation is more geared toward smoothness. That is, for anime, more time (and thus money) is spent per frame, but for western animation, there are a lot more frames (and they are checked more for accuracy, particularly off-model shots and lip-synching). They also use different animation shortcuts, codified by Osamu Tezuka for anime and Hanna-Barbera for western animation (though they both share a common major shortcut of letting dialogue ease up on animators' work). |
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