Spoilers "Superman & Lois" Season 1 spoiler discussion!

I can guarantee you The CW is charging the advertisers who put stuff up as commercials in the CW app and that's how it's making its money. How much they pay and how much the CW makes per 'viewing' from the CW app is anyone's guess; But while it's free to its users, The CW is definitely getting some money from it from the advertisers.

 

Of course they are making a lot of money from their AP advertising.

My point is that they are not making enough money to send a show that costs 5 million dollars per episode to make, to go straight to app, in the first week, or even the first year.

Burger Master is not going to give the CW 80 million dollars to make a season of Supergirl, in return for one ad per view, for each episode.

Terrestrial broadcast is very important.

 

I would've thought that went without saying. What else is advertising for? They don't interrupt our stories every few minutes just to be annoying and tedious, though they certainly do succeed at that.

 

I have a feeling it's much more complex than Burger Master* giving the CW 80 million dollars.

*Is that a real business? Never heard of it nor have I seen ads for it on the CW.

 

Hey, I was responding to someone who stated they didn't think the CW was making any money because the app is free.

 

And I was agreeing with you. Sometimes I quote a post to back it up, not argue against it. You're right, of course; the free apps are free to the consumer because they're advertiser-supported instead. It's the same reason that commercial television is free, while commercial-free cable requires a paid subscription.

Ohh, I wish app or streaming-site commercials were just one ad per view. Usually they show the same damn ads in almost every commercial break, which has never made sense to me. If I've seen it once, why waste my time by showing it three or four times in the same episode?

What I hate about The CW's ads on the website is that some of them are on a really slow server that freezes up every few seconds and takes like 2-3 minutes to get through a 30-second spot. This has been going on for years, so you'd think they would've fixed the server issue by now.

 

So the freezing up is on their side, I always assumed it was an issue with my computer.

Sure, but I don't see where it would be that hard to just put one quick line in there about Kara, or the DEO or Argus or something. I don't think one quick line that only takes a few seconds would hurt the storytelling that much, or alienate the people who haven't watched the other shows.

The Flash has done a pretty good job with Joe and Iris for most of it's run.

I kind of think at this point that I would have rather they just set in a separate universe from the other shows. As a big Arrowverse fan, I think I find the lack of connections to the rest of Arrowverse more distracting and confusing that a newbie fan would if the show was filled with them.

I hadn't thought of that, but I could definitely see it happening. Maybe that will be the cliffhanger, they think they've defeat all of the Kryptonians, but then we see a group escaped, and the leader commands the others to "bow before Zod".

 

"Bow"? I'm sorry, but please turn in your pop culture membership card and leave immediately.

 

Separate wings of the company.

The Vice president in charge of the ap pays nothing for Supergirl, and nothing for everything else in the cw library.

The app is nearly pure profit.

The number of people watching is cool.

The tens of millions of dollars they make a year is cool.

But the tv makes tens of millions of dollars a day.

(I'm guessing these numbers)

The over head for the app is less than millions a year. Tech support, admin, advertising, and server space. And they make tens of millions from that a year.

The overhead to producing and broadcasting several hundred hours of new tv every year costs a few hundred of million, and if they are lucky, they can make a billion.

Economies of scale.

 

Easy to say as a hypothetical when you're not the one who actually has to decide whether it will fit in a specific scene. I've been there -- I've often had to leave out Easter eggs and fun bits that I wanted to include in a story because they just didn't fit anywhere. It's compounded when you're working within the strict time limitations of a commercial TV episode.

Ah, it happens in a lot of shared universes. Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures never acknowledged each other or seemed to belong in the same universe, even though they both spun off of and overlapped with Doctor Who. The Netflix Marvel Cinematic Universe shows only made occasional vague allusions to the MCU movies and showed a New York City skyline that was conspicuously missing Stark Tower. And what I've seen of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing barely seemed to be part of the same DC Comics universe that it crossed over with in the original Crisis.

The priority of any series in a shared universe is itself first, connections second. So sometimes the pretense of continuity is looser than other times, if the individual series are different enough in tone and focus.

I mean, is Legends of Tomorrow any less disconnected from the others, really? There was a throwaway nod to the DEO in the season premiere, but otherwise its approach this season to aliens as scary monsters is virtually irreconcilable with Supergirl's approach to aliens as civil rights allegories. And it's weird that alien immigrants are rampant in Supergirl but invisible in every other Arrowverse show. S&L may not fit perfectly into the Arrowverse, but neither do the other shows.

 

Wut?

 

OK, that's a good point.

 

Which bit?

All this started because @Noname Given thought that I said that free aps don't make any money at all.

Zero.

When what i said is that free apps make less money than tv or paid aps like Netflix or Disney Plus.

A lot less money.

So much less money, that a free app could not produce quality full length content.

So, TV ratings, and the money made from TV advertising is way more important than the money made from the app.

I then went on to talk about compartmentalization.

Internally, the App people don't have to buy episodes from the TV people.

One big happy family.

Less overhead, equals more "relative" profit for the app.

 

Pare it down to comments about just what I posted about with actual facts and not stuff that seems pull out of the air.
And then there's the specific question I asked.

 

The point was that the ap doesn't pay for the production of Supergirl.

That's a different department, and a different vice president.

Because the Ap doesn't have to give any one 80 million dollars for every series that they are streaming, they can get a 50 thousand dollar cheque from Burger Master, and it's 90 percent profit.

 

Did someone say it did?
And this is the Superman and Lois thread.

 

No. You said it didn't.

It is more complex than Burger Master giving the CW 80 million dollars.

I was agreeing with you.

 

It's really hard to tell sometimes.

 

What a bizarre series of decisions to create a character named "Captain Luthor," use that name on the air, develop a backstory that makes perfect sense as an alternate version of Luthor, and then go "and then what if Luthor was somebody else!" It might top "Starfleet secret agent with a secret-agent-related grudge and also he's a frozen superhuman from 300 years in the past" in the sheer "huh?" factor.

 

That's not bizarre, it's just how creativity works. Those "Aha!" moments when the tentative pieces you're shuffling around suddenly fall into a shape that's amazingly better than what you thought you wanted are possibly the most satisfying parts of the process, and hardly uncommon.