Striking writers are wrong to think they should be paid more

I wonder if, when Emily from The X Factor was swinging an unfortunate girl around by the hair as part of a happy-slapping sequence, she realised she was creating additional material for internet and mobile devices. She was thrown off the talent show as a result, proving not all collateral content is beneficial to the creator.

Try telling that to the Writers’ Guild of America, which went on strike for the first time in two decades, as it insists that screenwriters should be paid more money to cover reformatting rights across digital platforms other than broadcast TV. What a truly bizarre prospect this is - and perhaps only on the west coast of America where the relativity of wealth is so insanely out of kilter could it garner any kind of purchase as a basis for a strike.

Writers in Hollywood are, it is true, at the bottom of the heap, but it’s a pretty gilded pile. The basis of the claim for greater pay is surely a fairly obvious fallacy - that television is going to offset its declining audiences and therefore production budgets with internet exposure and that scripts acquire an additional value when extended across all platforms for which writers should be paid.

It is a formula which many of us might wish we had adopted - if I’m paid for a piece in print then how about a bit more for it popping up on an interweb site? What the screenwriters have not cottoned onto is that the digital distribution platforms are going to make us all poorer. And that seems to be the central concept which all creative industries have such trouble computing.

When one hears about ratecards for video on the web quoting £40 to £50 cpm, one realises that the graph which plots enthusiasm against ignorance has reached a peak and this is the point at which revenue temporarily spikes. For the first time in five or six years the pendulum is even swinging back against the idea that the advertising-funded model of web content will work.

At the nerdiest edge of the internet there is now an argument that advertisers will no longer have to stick their brands to content as there are so many better ways to reach the consumer.

Many of the valiant efforts showcased by our major broadcasters around the creative challenge of making really excellent TV out of a tube of glitter and a premium rate phone line reflect these new economic pressures. It does not signal an inevitable decline in quality - just a more variable interpretation of what quality is, but it does mark the passing of peak earnings in the broadcast industry.

Emily Bell is director of digital content, Guardian News and Media

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