The ‘Mad Men’ Economic Miracle
(December 4, 2012) Three months ago, “Breaking Bad” cut off its fifth and final season on a maddening cliffhanger. Just as the D.E.A. agent Hank Schrader realized that his mild-mannered brother-in-law was actually a coldblooded meth lord, the show’s rabid viewership also realized that it would need to wait until the summer, when the season resumes, to find out what happens next. For fans like me, it has been and will continue to be an interminable wait.
For AMC, the network that broadcasts “Breaking Bad,” it will be a very profitable one. Cliffhangers may have been around for more than a thousand years — since at least the composition of “One Thousand and One Nights” — but no one has monetized them as brilliantly as cable networks. In order to get paid, Charles Dickens had to sell the next chapter of his serialized novels; in order to sell advertising, ABC had to order more episodes of its hit show “Lost.” But for the next several months, AMC is converting our eagerness into millions of dollars without showing a single new episode.
Cable TV has developed one of the most clever business models in our modern economy. Until recently, AMC was a basic-cable backwater known for “Threes Stooges” marathons. But a few years ago, it tweaked its business and began offering two or three hours of original programming on a few dozen nights a year. Starting with “Mad Men” in 2007, the network landed hit shows that developed small but obsessive followings. Soon after, it began making larger financial demands of the cable and satellite providers, like Comcast and DirectTV, that carry the network. AMC now charges these providers about 40 cents a month for each subscriber, including the millions who will never watch “Mad Men” or “Breaking Bad.” These providers can refuse to pay up, but doing so would infuriate legions of vocal viewers. (Last summer, the Dish Network played chicken with AMC and lost.) AMC collects $30 million a month in fees alone on a base of 80 million subscribers, which is pretty good considering that the last episode of “Breaking Bad” had fewer than three million viewers.
Read more at The New York Times