While it is well-known that advertising revenue has made CCTV, the provincial and regional stations superb examples of the proverbial cash cow, we find out from "Li Lisi of the Creative Power Entertaining Co., Ltd. (“Creative Power”) in Guangzhou" how little they are willing to pay for their programming.
Animation demands a large amount of upfront capital, particularly from the beginning; the cost may amount to 10,000 Yuan per minute. Later, the cost might be reduced to a few thousand Yuan per minute. However, China’s TV stations can pay very little and differ greatly. Some small TV stations may only pay 10 Yuan per minute, and the fee may increase to 80-100 Yuan per minute for larger stations. The largest China Central TV may pay a few hundred Yuan per minute.
Obscure TV stations have even asked you to pay the cost. Therefore, it can be said that you “lose a penny as you put a penny” in developing original animation. Then you may do sums, on average, we would be able to recover the investment, in theory, only when the animation was broadcasted on dozens of TV stations. In general, we are able to recover 40% of our investment through TV media.
