Television actors can make boat loads of money. Some more than others. Hugh Laurie makes $400,000 per episode while Ashley Tisdale makes $30,000. TV Guide compiled a list of TV’s top earners a while back, so luckily we can take a look by the numbers. Here’s your chance to visualize the data.
You can download the data in CSV format or in Excel. There are four columns: actor name, show, pay per episode, and show type (comedy or drama). I entered this data by hand to get it in a manageable format, so keep an eye out for typos (just like in real life!).
The challenge here will be that there’s quite a few names on the list, so it’s a bit too much to show every value at once. You’ll have to decide what you want to show and what story you want to tell. Do actors in drama or comedies make more? What kind of distribution do you see? How do top actor salaries compare to that of the average actor?
One more time, here’s the link to the CSV and Excel files. Leave links to your graphs in the comments below.
Deadline: February 22, 2011
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I’m apologize ahead of time. It was the first thing that jumped out at me and I couldn’t resist.
http://www.yawniton.com/yawnitonAssets/linkedGraphics/twoAndHalfDumb.png
I’m plugging away here and in collecting my additional data I notice Suite Life of Zack and Cody is on there for top earners in 2010 (I think it’s referring to 2010), but their show ended in 2008. Are they earning that much for repeat shows? If so, I’m shocked no other repeat shows made the list!
Good catch. I think the TV Guide folks might need to update their numbers.
They now have a show called “Suite Life On-Deck” it’s a spin-off of the original show.
Ditto on Shubha’s comments but still, this is really cool data! Simple bar chart… http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/toppaidtvactors/Dashboard1?:embed=yes&:toolbar=yes&:tabs=no
Looking at combined income: 2 1/2 Men make more money in 30 minutes than 4 Housewives in an hour. how about that for gender income inequality? ;)
That’s because 2.5 Men generates yachtloads of $$$ from ad revenue by being one of the highest rated shows on television in the A18-49 demographic highly coveted by advertisers. Desperate Housewives’ ratings have been mediocre at best this past year.
But you have a point – most of the top earning actors on the list are male.
I know, I wasn’t being totally serious. Would be interesting though to compare Ad revenue with total cast salary.
Also you could say, that Charlie Sheen is actually working the whole 30 minutes (or rather 20 accounting for advvertising) because he is in almost every scene. The Housewifes are having maybe 10-15 minutes (?) screentime each episode..
Since many shows have different numbers of episodes, I downloaded the number of shows in a season from Wikipedia and calculated each actor’s annual salary. Then, I added the extra data from the TV guide link. Here are the data in a Google spreadsheet: http://bit.ly/gfKNYB
If we fit these data to a gamma distribution, the probability that someone would make as much or more than Oprah in a year is 0.16% (P=0.0016)!
Oh, and my picture: http://bit.ly/gJ1EFQ
Thanks for the Google data – but a mistake in the original data remains – I think Angus T Jones in the show Two and Half Men should be Two and a Half Men no? (sorry, mi no watch di show).
I hope a small javascript app is ok :)
http://rappdaniel.com/other/vis/
I like this. Simple and fairly effective at showing the differences between Charlie Sheen and the top drama actors, though a little harder to compare within genres.
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With protovis: http://vis.mjs-svc.com/tv/
Little bit of interactivity to separate dramas from comedies or to show both, and hover over each of the bars to see which show it is.
Aaaand midterm tomorrow morning! Best get to bed!
Couple of Wordles…(click to enlarge)
Comedy Drama
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My entry here…
http://keithsuckling.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/it-pays-to-be-funny/
I had fun
Nice job, Keith! Yours gets my vote.
Thanx Bob.
I have been wondering if mine is off target since it is not like the other submissions.
A statistical treatment with SAS: http://bit.ly/h5Bxgo
Simple charts comparing distribution of earnings by genre and gender: http://www.scribd.com/doc/49185613/pay-per-ep
Relationship between actors’ pay and program audience: http://i.imgur.com/fXINA.jpg
(Audience figures for week ending 30 January 2011 from http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/)
Since it’s simple data, I opted for a simple approach – some data is best not over-analyzed! :-)
http://robslink.com/SAS/democd48/tv_income.htm
Just a simple SAS/GRAPH scatter plot, plotted against a $-axis that extends to zero, and the markers shaded by Comedy/Drama. The graph also has simple html hover-text, so you can mouse over the markers and see the exact data values (no fancy software or plugins needed to view the hover text!)
I also created a 2nd graph, using the annual pay values Aaron posted, since that adds an interesting facet.
Hi
Here’s our thoughts on how to approach this: http://media.juiceanalytics.com/tv_top_earners/TVsTopEarnersExplorer.html
This is an area bar chart with interactive bubbles. Hold your mouse down on a box for a Steve Jobsian, “Oh, and one more thing.” moment. :-)
Lately we’ve been using Flex and HTML/SVG. This demo is in Flex using an internal framework inspired by Jeff Heer and team’s Flare. Blog post to follow soon with some more details.
Thanks.
nice effort in pulling out the data!
Thanks. We some cleanup on the data and matched some more dimensions in. It’s at http://media.juiceanalytics.com/tv_top_earners/top-tv-earners.csv if anybody wants it.
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Hi Nathan:
my take is here. http://bit.ly/ejeGdo
How come out of the 63 actors earning more than $50000/episode only 19 are women?
Take a look at the treemap in Spotfire:
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/Treemap.html
The proportion of highly compensated women isn’t really different than the proportion of women as a whole. Women earn more on average in comedies than men, and more in dramas too, though these numbers probably aren’t significant. The share of women in long-running shows (which seems to be the biggest driver of high salaries) are the same as the population average (7/23).All fun stuff from here: http://media.juiceanalytics.com/tv_top_earners/TVsTopEarnersExplorer.html So, if we believe this data, gender equality is a quantity problem, not a salary problem.
But do we believe this data? It’s not a scientific survey, but probably just what TVGuide could lasso together from press releases, so I’m leery of conclusions.
What software was the visualization created in?
You may want to update the Charlie Sheen data ;)
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@Onttu: The Juice Analytics visualization is done in Adobe Flex using open source components that we’ve developed here:
https://github.com/juiceinc/juicekit-flex-core
https://github.com/juiceinc/juicekit-flex-data
https://github.com/juiceinc/juicekit-flex-sparkflare
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