How do game show award money amounts work? Some game shows are only able to give away a few thousand dollars and others can give away millions. Who sponsors / funds shows and how are final award amounts decided?
In: Other
gameshows basically buy an insurance against larger winnings. it is then the banks job to figure out the probability of such large wins, and offer a premium to the gameshow they have to pay regardless what is won.
for small amounts (a few thousand) the gameshows itself can probably handle, for larger ones you need insurances (but are great advertisements). In the middle range you would basically still need insurance, but the premiums (and financial overhead) would probably be too high.
Noncash prizes are almost always provided to the show free of charge by the maker, in exchange for having the product and company name mentioned in the product description. (The Price is Right, in particular, has that part of the market down)
For cash prizes…. the prize amounts are mostly based on producing excitement and show budget. For something like Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy, the prize money can be pretty big, because the shows get lots of prime time viewers, so ads are valuable (besides, Pat/Vanna/Trebek make way more per episode than the winner gets in prize money)
Daytime or cable shows have lower budgets because they have lower viewership and thus cheaper ad slots to pay for the show. These shows, except for Price is Right, get remarkably little viewership, which is why they usually look low budget all the way around, not just in prize money
“Millionaire” was a really big deal at first — it only ran occasionally, always in prime time. That million dollar prize possibility was a huge draw. Even so, those prizes were covered by insurance — indeed, at one point, the insurance company threatened to sue the show, because the early questions were easier than they’d been led to believe, and so more people than expected we’re winning 8/16/32k
Shows have sponsors, shows are syndicated, meaning sold to networks who air them. Overall, game shows are incredibly cheap to make… you have only 1 highly paid host and the contestants just get prizes. There’s one set, they can film line 6-8 episodes a day so crew is efficiently used. The prize money is way cheaper than a scripted show paying many actors. For ones with huge prizes, those are typically aired in prime time when ad revenue is bigger and the top prizes aren’t won that often.
For a bit on the business side, for pretty much all game shows, the amount of money they give is fairly small compared to the actual cost of producing the show (which is quite substantial). Secondly, the amount the producers of the show sell/license the show for when it airs on TV is massive money, and ads that run against prime-time gameshows are incredibly expensive.
Outside of your rare $1M winner on who wants to be a millionaire, the amount these shows provide in prize money isn’t particularly interesting when you look at all the money going in and out and costs and revenue of the game show. The “prize money” is just another line item in their cost, and it won’t even be big one. The crew costs far far more for just filming a show than any money they give away.
Latest Answers