The Los Angeles Times put together a fascinating list that reveals who the most overpaid and underpaid television stars working today are. You might be surprised at the results. Basically, the newspaper took the personality’s salary and divided it by the number of viewers to arrive at a dollar figure per viewer, and left us to decide whether he or she is overpaid or underpaid.
Chelsea Handler — who receives $12 million a year and only has 718,000 viewers — ended up at the top of the list as the most overpaid star in television, as she’s being paid $16.70 per viewer (which begs the question: Why would anyone give Chelsea Handler a $12 million contract?). On the other side of the spectrum, Jersey Shore’s Snooki qualifies as one of the most underpaid personalities in television, as she’s being paid about 16 CENTS per viewer, which in my opinion is still more than she’s worth.
You can see the entire list and read more about the methodology at the LA Times, but here are the highlights:
#1 Chelsea Hander: $16.70 per viewer
#2 Anderson Cooper: $13.54 per viewer
#3 David Letterman: $9.54 per viewer
#4 Jon Stewart: $8.24 per viewer
#5 Bill O’Reilly: $5.24 per viewer
#8: Judge Judy: $5.00 per viewer
#11: Stephen Colbert: $3.75 per viewer
#16 Tina Fey: $1.57 per viewer
#18 Ashton Kutcher: $1.16 per viewer
#23: Snooki: $0.16 per viewer
#24: Ty Burrell (Modern Family): $0.08 per viewer
There is some unfairness built into the methodology, as it fails to account for the fact that someone like Jon Stewart — who may only receive 1.7 million viewers — delivers that number of viewers five nights a week. Meanwhile, Snooki — who has over 7 million viewers — delivers them only 15 times a year. A more fair test, perhaps, would be to add up the number of episodes per year, multiply it by the viewers, and then divide it by the salary.
For instance, Jon Stewart tapes 161 times a year. Multiply that by 1.7 million viewers per night and you get 273 million viewers per year. Divide that by his $14 million contract, and he receives roughly one nickel ($0.051) per viewer. That’s less than even Ty Burrell.
(Source: LA Times)
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Immediate guess without reading list: Jay Leno.
After reading list: Yes Chelsea Handler makes a lot of sense. Modern Family is an ensemble cast – $0.08 for Ty Burrell or Sophia Vergara is a steal, but way too much for Manny.
I’m going to take these figures, write DirectTV a letter, and state that I’m only willing to pay $11.99 more per year for Comedy Central.
Additionally, and although Ty Burrell may have a legitimately crappy contract (no idea), he is also part of an ensemble piece, with presumably the finite salary pie having to be distributed among many “equals.” As opposed to a talk show host, who is almost alone in doing all of the heavy-lifting and in driving viewership.
And wasn’t that hack Chelsea Handler providing personal services for some time to the owner of the network or something? And by “personal services,” I mean thrusting her windburnt and hardened ladyparts at the guy.
Yeah she was fucking the owner of Comcast I believe, and Comcast owns E.
718,000 million viewers… that’s plenty.
I was going to comment on the same thing. That’s actually more people than there are on the planet.
what
Does this take into account the fact that Letterman owns Worldwide Pants and isn’t just the host of the show? Because that would help to explain why he makes more than somebody who’s just a host. I would say the same for Tina being a creator/writer/producer, in addition to being the lead actress.
Also, pay them whatever because they’re awesome.
Either way he still makes too much.
Additionally, this methodology fails to account for how much work a given “star” puts into a show. Jon Stewart’s salary covers not only the on-camera perfomances that one might seek to compare against Ashton Kutcher but also his work in the writer’s room developing performance content. So what you spend on him vs. Kutcher is in part saving you on production costs.
I’d pay for quality any day, over paying for a hack. But then that’s why I don’t run a network.
(I was fired as the network head of SPIKE when I discovered there were really only 700 ways to die and that they were padding things.)
This is actually kind of fascinating. I would love to do it with news anchors. And then promptly get fired.
I was told there would be no math.
+1
Jon Stewart’s only on 4 nights a week – no Fridays for he or Colbert.
But yeah, this little exercise is far too simplistic to really tell us anything, other than that Chelsea Handler is overpaid – I originally read her contract as $1 million and still thought it was horrible.
But what do Ty Burrell’s numbers tell us? On a show with an ensemble cast, on a broadcast network, in primetime. His per viewer cost better be low comparatively.
As I began reading, I was going to call into question the methods of this study, then I saw who was #1 and it justified all of the work they put into it.
well. considering how Chelsea Handler got her job in the first place any amount is too much.
due to syndication money, the answer is still the cast of Friends.
+ Seinfeld
Wouldn’t it make more sense to divide the amount of advertising revenue their shows generate by their salaries if we’re trying to determine “worth”? You’d think a newspaper based in the same town as Hollywood would understand the economics of television. Just saying….
“fascinating” list
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Does this list also include Handler’s shows “After Lately” and “Are You There, Chelsea?” on top of “Chelsea Lately” or is the latter the only one being counted?
I looked at the list again. Looks like it’s only for “Chelsea Lately.” Holy fuck that’s a lot of money.
Snooki gets paid?
Plus endorsements from Valtrex and the makers of Plan B…
WILL MCAVOY LOLZ
And how did “highest” paid get translated into “overpaid” by Dustin? This is like a broken glass dick.
It’s hard to calculate Jon Stewart’s actual audience. There are the people who tune in to actually watch the show. But his material is also covered by other news outlets covering the best of late night comedy. They’re reaching a wider audience than the numbers might show.