Who Is Making the Most Money in Vertical Right Now?
The format has become a multi-billion-dollar business. Actors are the most visible, but producers, writers, platform executives, studio owners and investors all have a stake.
Who is making the most money in the vertical industry right now?
The vertical space has grown into a multi-billion-dollar business, creating opportunities across every part of the industry. The visible faces are the actors. The money, as in every entertainment sector, is distributed differently.
Where the revenue goes
The format’s revenue arrives at the platform. ReelShort alone is tracking toward a billion dollars this year. From there it flows, in descending order of share, to platform owners and their investors, to the studios that produce for them, to the producers who run those studios’ slates, and finally to the writers, directors and performers who make the titles.
That ordering is not unique to vertical. What is unique is the speed. A producer who moved into the format two years ago may now be running a slate of a hundred series a year. An actor who has led fifty series has, in most cases, no participation in any of them.
The question
As the industry continues to expand, where do you think the biggest earnings are happening? Producers, writers, directors, actors, platform executives, studio owners?
The association’s interest is in the gap between the top and bottom of that list. A format where the workforce is paid day rates while the platform books a billion in revenue is a format that will eventually lose its workforce to the first competitor that offers a share. The association’s standards work includes rate transparency for exactly this reason: the first step to a fair split is knowing what the split is.