Janey:
Try looking at it this way:
Assume there are 50 million households that have either basic cable or satellite and they all pay about $50/mo and get 100 channels. The total revenue would be about 2.5B. Assume that the cable company provides their services free of charge to the customer and has no bills to pay. This is an asinine assumption, but it allows us to assume that the money goes solely to the networks that run on your cable tv.
Dividing 2.5B by 100 channels gives an average of $25M in revenues for the channels. With that money, they have to pay for their programming, pay for equipment, pay all their workers, and generate a profit. That's just not enough. It's not even enough to pay all their workers. There is no way we could have cable at a reasonable cost without commercials.
I'm sorry that you took my earlier post as near a flame but you just didn't seem to be looking very deep into why they run commercials on cnn, espn, tbs, etc.
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