How much would you spend for a 30 second commercial on Grey's Anatomy? It's the most expensive TV show to advertise on, according to Ad Age magazine. It costs $419,000 for a half minute.
In second place is Sunday Night Football, which costs $358,000, and then The Simpsons, which is a cool $315,000. Rounding out the top 10 are Heroes ($296,000), Desperate Housewives ($270,000), CSI ($248,000), Two and a Half Men ($231,000), Survivor and Private Practice (tied at $208,000 each), and then Prison Break ($200,000).
I would think that CSI: Miami would be up there, considering it's the most popular TV show on the planet (Baywatch used to be too - other countries must really love American shows with hot sun and/or beaches). And what about Dancing with the Stars and House? I thought they'd be up near the top too.
[via TV Tattle]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
10-03-2007 @ 11:58AM
Emma said...
Wow, ABC must have done some serious hyping to get Private Practice up there.
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10-03-2007 @ 12:24PM
Cuzzy said...
you only list 9
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10-03-2007 @ 12:49PM
Bob Sassone said...
Yeah, you're right, the Ad Age article only lists nine. But I looked at their chart and found out the tenth show and updated the list (it's Prison Break). Thanks for pointing that out Cuzzy.
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10-03-2007 @ 1:08PM
Porchland said...
Total viewers don't matter. It's 18-35, 18-49, or don't bother. If you're 62 and watching "CSI," Toyota isn't paying for your eyeballs.
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10-03-2007 @ 4:05PM
Sean said...
These advertising rates actually seem pretty low to me. I mean, let's say Heroes (which gets about 300,000 for a thirty second slot) airs 20 minutes of comemrcials an episode. That comes to 12 million dollars in ad revenue per episode. I don't know how much it costs to make an episode of Heroes, but paying the main cast members alone probably costs at least four or five million. Add in the cost of sets, film crews, special effects, advertising the show, and a number of other beind-the-scenes expenses, there's probably only a couple million of profit left over. And Heroes is considered a hit show; how small must the profit margin on a mid-list show be?
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10-03-2007 @ 10:16PM
Bill Magliocco said...
The producers, etc. really make their $ if/when the show goes into syndication, cable and DVD sales. First run broadcast does not make the producer the big bucks...something called "the back end" and another thing called "hollywood accounting".
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10-03-2007 @ 8:44PM
Mathew said...
@5: I'd be very surprised if it costs nearly as much as you think to produce an episode of Heroes. Ad revenue isn't going to be as high as you think either, you're probably talking in the region of $8.5 million. Multiplying that by this season's 24 episodes gives a total of $204 million. I'd guess it costs in the region of $3 million to produce a single episode start to finish, but we'll call it $4 million to be on the safe side, that's only $96 million in production costs. You need to take promotional costs out of the revenue, but you're still looking at around $100 million in profits over a season, which seems plenty profitable to me.
Honestly, those numbers are guesstimates at best, so if anyone with actual information wants to challenge them, feel free -- but I'd be surprised if I was massively wrong on this.
@6: You're completely wrong, the producers take their cut along with everyone else out of the per episode budget which is paid for by the advertising revenue. They may get a little extra from syndication and dvd rights, but it's far from the "big bucks".
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10-03-2007 @ 10:32PM
Sean Flanders said...
I don't know how much any of the shows on this list cost to produce, but I do know that Friends used to cost 6 million an ep just to pay the main cast members, and that Buffy the Vampire Slayer (a WB show, so I'm assuming far less expensive than a comparable NBC show) cost 2 million an episode.
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