ASK & DISCUSS INDEX

10 years, 7 months ago - Marlom Tander

Every deal is it's own, and what you get offered depends on how much it's valued. Did you get to do a Fly on the Wall at Man United? Expect to retire on the sale if you can BBC and Sky into a bidding war. But if it's a "english country crafts" then it's an episode in a minor channel and if it's Portugal TV, not a lot.

If you have an offer on the table, take a distributor to lunch and tell them about it.

If you don't have an offer, wait until you do. Or try and find a distributor who deals in this area.

Generally the guy on the other side :-

a) Isn't spending their own money, but DOES have a limited budget.
b) Doesn't want to rip you off, and does WANT your material, (as opposed to "just anything that fills the space" - if that's his position then you're a price taker).
c) Has a shrewd idea about what it should have cost in time and money, and what sort of work rate you should have.

So he has in mind that YOU should be happy with about X. If his budget runs to X, and he offers X, he's expecting you to take X. If he can't offer X, he'll probably say something like "I'd love to offer X, but my hands are tied, Y is the best I can do". In that case you might be able to push harder IF you have the detail to justify and it's not just overspending.

So YOU also need to have a good idea what X is. It's not what it cost you in time/money, it's what it should have cost, based on you making N per annum if you did this full time.

10k

Of course you might end up talking to someone who starts low, so you go high, but you both know you'll end up around X.

If you don't like wheeler dealing and you are asked to name a price, say X+a bit, then you can come down a bit and everyone is happy.

And finally, the deal isn't done until it's signed. I once sold a small business. The buyer - CEO - sat in my room and I named my price, my silly high OTT starting point for discussion price. He said yes and flew home. I spend the next few days thinking WTF just happened then got call call. "My finance guys had kittens when I told them what we'd agreed. We need to rethink the price". I still got a good deal, one closer to what i expected and to this day I have no idea if that was his tactic all along, or whether he really did want to offer the initial sum.

10 years, 7 months ago - Marlom Tander

Worked math

10K to make, and a busy guy would make 4 a year, and 40K if income is fair then you need to sell each one for 20K. So in this case X is about 20K. If you only make 1 a year on account of slowness or inability to get deals, that doesn't mean you can expect to get 50K for it. Your poor work rate isn't their problem. OTOH if you have a streamlinered approach and are making 6, then the extra 20k a year for you is reward for efficiency.

Note - the above only applies to deals where the buyer expects to be covering your costs and as an organisation likes to think that they support work. Smaller buyers will be very much "this is my budget" and in those cases you just need to hope you can make multiple sales.

10 years, 7 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin

Just for context, 15-odd years ago, the Equinox strand was £60k/hr, 10-odd years ago, BBC2 regional peaktime was £25k for a 30' commission, European non-terrestrial was around £38k/hour buyout.

Then TV crashed.

TV doesn't want to be pumping out reality crap, but all the money vanished and their options were limited. Regional ITV nearly folded, massive restructuring and regulatory releases kept it alive. Non-terrestrials became prolific, the internet took away the ad money, budgets collapsed, cheap content was possible with handheld cameras, every channel was hit, every supplier was hit, the glory days were over. Worse still, the public didn't care about quality, they were happy with cheap, nasty, made by the yard TV which advertisers wouldn't pay for. It wasn't pretty.

So, the person you're talking to probably doesn't have a pot of gold. Maybe £5-10k for a 30' acquisition, maybe less. If it's to go out on a Czech-language arts-only digital channel, could be enough for a nice holiday or to recover some costs.

Things that'll affect the bargaining are 1) territory 2) buyout/license/screening count 3) exclusivity 4) subject, content and scarcity 5) nature of the station 6) you get the idea. The money will most likely be related to the size of the audience, not your costs. If you've got a pretty but content-light show using all archive, standard definition, and it's already been on youtube for a couple of years take whatever they offer seriously then get talking to an agent about selling it to the other territories. The agent will take a good chunk, but should make it up with more territories having already been given a free sale on one. The kudos is probably worth more to your future than the sale to your present, anyway.