Looking into the writers strike again, some writers reveal that they want something between getting paid when producers get paid to every time someone views their content. At a forum at MIT yesterday, Mark Warshaw, a writer, producer, and director who works on developing transmedia opportunities for the TV show Heroes, spoke about the writers strike. He gave a rhetorical question “Is it fair that Sting gets money every time his song is played on the radio?” to prove his point. Unfortunately, he kind of mixed up his facts.

First, Sting, or any musician in fact, gets no money for playing their songs on the radio. Even the producers don’t make any money. In double fact, for decades, record producers paid radio stations to play their music for the promotional value.

Further, let’s try to understand fair compensation. No one, writers, director, producers, or actors, are paid for each television viewer. Let’s remember, we don’t pay for TV shows. Producers and networks make money on advertising, using the number of viewers to decide on how much to charge for the advertising. That money then gets split between all parties involved (with the vast majority going to the network and tiny percentages going to those hard working writers and actors). Even movies and DVDs, which are paid for in part by each viewer, have many revenue opportunities from product placement, endorsements, etc. (if a line from Spider-Man appears in a Pizza Hut commercial, does the writer have to be paid?). I’m not saying it’s fair, cause it’s not, but let’s look at the real business model.

Now the internet, the source of all our conflict. It is unrealistic for writers to expect compensation for every appearance or viewing of their work. Aside from them never enjoying this kind of business model, the internet encourages widespread use of content that trying to reimburse the original creators for every page would be staggeringly time consuming (just try to get permission to license a song legally and in three years we’ll talk).

Warshaw told MIT that NBC has 10,000 pages of Heroes content and I guess he wants a couple of cents for each page. Unfortunately, NBC is not likely charging advertisers over and over again for each page. Web advertising more often trends toward bulk buys (advertising across the entire site or section) or pay-per-click like Google AdWords. And the reason people would even come to the NBC site is because there’s 10,000 pages of Heroes content. If there was only one or ten pages, viewers would find their information other places.

Let’s not forget, writers are often paid salaries in addition to residuals on their work. Their residuals might suck (four to eight cents for a DVD split between all writers) but writers are getting paid initially for their work; work which is paid for by the networks and producers. Only the entertainment industry enjoys lifelong expectations of residuals for their work (I don’t still get checks for websites I made).

So maybe writers should reconsider how they’re demanding residuals for new media. As I wrote about before (referencing Techdirt’s excellent article), having a rock hard contract might limit revenue opportunities for writers, forcing them into a one-size fits all agreement that can’t possible cover all possible revenue avenues coming over the next several years. And the internet is still so new, media companies still need to experiment on how to make money. It’s not just throwing a video up with ads.

So writers, it sucks that I have to be critical of you guys (I feel everyone else is already beating up on those greedy producers) but be more future looking than your media company overlords and maybe try figuring out what the internet is really all about.