Friday 18 December 2009

X Factor, ITV and Simon Cowell

So the winner of the X Factor, Joe McElderry, is now filling the tabloids with headlines and suprisingly fighting this year for the Christmas no 1. However he is not the real winner of the X Factor, no he should not fool himself. On current X Factor run rate he will have as much chance of playing in butlins holiday camps in two years time as he does playing Las Vegas. There are two real winners from this yeas X Factor the first being ITV themselves.


ITV has had a terrible time of it over the last few years. It has seen revenues decline and decline and it took over 7 months to find a new chairman with many drop outs despite an astronomical salary on offer. However its new Chairman, ex Asda boss Archie Norman, must be now looking forward to his Christmas turkey thanks to the success of this year’s X Factor. The reason behind all of this, as with everything, is money and in this case advertising revenue.

The final of the X Factor in the UK this year was expected to generate £20 million of ad revenues for ITV, yes £20 million just for the final. Spot rates for the final were an alleged £250,000. Overall the X Factor is expected to have generated over £100 million for ITV this year.

However whichever way you look at it the overall winner always has been and always will be the man on the end with the waxed chest. Yes the big winner is always Simon Cowell. Cowell’s appearance fee’s alone for the series are estimated around the £5m mark. He is also the major owner of the format and gets paid for that and through his production company Syco he is also paid for production fees. This adds another estimated £2million. So his personal take home from this year’s X Factor is estimated at £7million. However this is small potatoes compared to his US deal where he is lead judge on American Idol. This is a reputed $125 million (£75m) for the next two series.

This of course is just part of the his total incomes, add in Britain’s Got Talent and the little matter of all the revenue from the acts now signed to his record label and I start to get lost at the potential income. All I do know is that the other day the entire top 10 were either acts that were signed to Cowell or had appeared on X Factor within the last few weeks. With that sort of power it looks like X Factor will be here for a long while yet. So have a good Christmas dear readers, Mr Cowell definitely will.