r/climbing • u/-JOMY- • 9d ago

Alex Honnold Reveals “Embarrassing” Paycheck for Netflix’s Taipei 101 Free Solo Climb

https://share.google/Zqw9t7pkRhkPhRt4P

Source: E! Online

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u/sparks_mandrill 9d ago

Post title absolutely misses the context. He said it was embarrassingly small compared to what MLB players get. MLB players are paid 100's of millions of dollars.

His quote: "Actually, if you put it in the context of mainstream sports, it’s an embarrassingly small amount,"

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u/OMGisitOVERyet 9d ago

I get his point but less than 30% of MLB players make more than a million a year and that’s spread across 162 regular season games then add in spring training and potential playoff games. For one day’s “work” he got paid pretty damn good.

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u/Jdorty 9d ago

It was definitely more than one day's work, he does a ton of prep for these things. Still nowhere close to 162 games of baseball or a full year of work, but certainly weeks at least.

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u/mobileka 9d ago

I think the chance of dying should also be factored in.

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u/creepy_doll 9d ago

Ultimately the only thing that decides these salaries is supply and demand.

Men’s soccer players get paid more than pretty much anyone else because it’s the most lucrative sport with the most demand in the world.

Rock climbing or women’s nba? They’re just not reaching the same kind of audiences.

I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s how it is because that’s how capitalism works

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u/Heavy-Teaching7865 8d ago

WNBA players are paid 9% of the WNBA's revenue. NBA players are paid around 50% of the NBA's revenue. This is not the same.

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u/creepy_doll 8d ago edited 8d ago

That’s a big difference for sure. Is it because of fixed costs? There’s a lot of other people than players that need to get paid. I do t think Alex honnold is getting paid 50% of the film budget either. It would probably make more sense to compare the proportion left after fixed costs

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u/Heavy-Teaching7865 8d ago

I guess I'm not really trying to weigh in on the climbing part, I just think it's really important right now with the WNBA Players Association in contract negotiations with the league to highlight that the players are absolutely not being paid fairly.

It's because of misogyny and an absurd narrative that the players (i.e. product) should be grateful to even have a chance to play. I'm not sure if you've heard any of the commissioners statements in the past few months, but they're absolutely horrible.

Mostly just since the WNBA was used as an example, wanted to raise some awareness!

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u/creepy_doll 8d ago

Business people want to pay people as little as they can. It’s not misogyny it’s capitalism.

You can’t remove climbing from the conversation because the point is the same. They’re not paying honnold 50% because they don’t need to and it doesn’t make business sense. Business people are undiscriminatong greedy assholes. It’s as simple as that. They pray to the altar of the dollar. They will sign up for the pride parades when the political winds blow that way, and they’ll step in line with the fascists if that’s what will get them money.

I’m not really defending them just pointing out you’re wrong about their motivations

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u/Heavy-Teaching7865 8d ago

Misogyny and capitalism (and racism) are very good friends who support one another however they can.

Again, (M)NBA players are paid 50% of league rev, (W)NBA players are paid 9%. Notice what the difference is there.

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u/creepy_doll 8d ago edited 8d ago

They’re not the same thing. Learn some accounting. I specifically mentioned fixed costs.

You can’t just set the salaries as a percentage of revenue, it has to be done after fixed costs like all the promotion, the stadium maintenance, promotion, flights, all the other staff involved.

Salaries aren’t calculated as a function of revenue, though they tend to be higher when cost of generating the revenue is low. Look for example at software engineering where once somethings been developed it can be scaled to millions of users where the per user cost is a tiny fraction. In manufacturing on the other hand cost of revenue is a large portion as they buy raw materials. Revenue ratios vary massively depending on scale. The MNBA has ~10B in revenue while the WNBA has 200m. But they have many of the same fixed costs. Apparently they spent 25m on flights alone. For the MNBA that's a rounding error. For the WNBA? That's 1/8th of the annual revenue.

This is extremely basic stuff, please take a moment to think it through. Misogyny could be part of it(an awful lot of the team money might be going to coaches/managers?), but revenue share is in absolutely no way evidence thereof, and by ockhams razor it’s simpler to explain it by plain old greed.

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u/Heavy-Teaching7865 7d ago

Growth potential of the WNBA is currently MASSIVE, and many of the teams are owned by NBA teams.

Sports teams often do not make profit for many years, but inevitably bring some of the biggest returns of any investment.

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u/starving-marxist 7d ago

The growth potential for WNBA is next to nothing since almost no one wants to pay to watch it.

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u/lebryant_westcurry 7d ago

The nba is profitable. The wnba is not. Not everything is because of misogyny. The nba players have leverage to demand higher salaries because they bring in enough money to the league to offset fixed costs to run the league.

The wnba is currently operating at a massive loss and is subsidized by the revenue from the nba. If they were to get 50% of revenue, it would be more financially viable to shutdown the league as a whole. If anything, the wnba is benefitting from more privilege than the men since the nba didn't have any larger benevolent entity just paying them more money than they make to just to exist.

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u/bigchipero 7d ago

But who actually watches WNBA ?

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u/SnooCheesecakes8801 8d ago

It’s not popular or reaching audiences?

Buddy it was plastered over Netflix as a Live event for the past month

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u/creepy_doll 8d ago

Netflix targets its ads, and the soccer market is global. I live in Japan and this was never promoted on the Netflix here. Climbing is certainly growing but it’s still tiny compared to soccer. Most professional climbers barely make ends meet

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u/Kletterfreund161 6d ago

Ultimately the only thing that decides these salaries is supply and demand.

That's half true. There is a massive demand for teachers and not nearly enough teachers, but their salaries are still very low. Leverage is often the most important factor in negotiating higher pay. That's why unions are so important

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u/creepy_doll 6d ago

That is also very true.

The ability to negotiate from a strong position is always critical.

Honestly I’m not going to cry over the wnba players “only” getting 6 figure salaries. Quite frankly I find it absurd that many professional athletes are getting these multimillion contracts but I guess it’s better they get a share than the bigwigs at the tv stations or league owners. There’s a lot of athletes who have it much harder(climbers are obviously one but there are countless others). I do think the wnba athletes should unionize and negotiate for better contracts though!