Don't they lose money if they don't sell cookbooks?

Forget about the sale of cookbooks. That isn't what drives the revenue of the show. In fact, in terms of cookbook sales, the cookbooks written by the Masterchef winners have been very poor sellers and generate very little profit.

The cookbooks are more important for the publishers of the books because they hope that by associating their books with a TV show that will generate more profits for the cookbook. But as someone who has bought quite a few cookbooks over the years, I can tell you that there hasn't been a cookbook produced by the Masterchef brand that has inspired me to spend the $25 for the book.

The only thing that drives revenue for shows like Masterchef is the advertising dollars that are sold by the networks. A few years ago, a show like Masterchef could generate about $60 million a season in ad revenue. And ad revenue is based on ratings.

It's more difficult to parse out the ratings for any TV show today because the way that people watch TV has changed dramatically over the past five years. The networks themselves have had to develop new metrics to measure their audiences - because people are "cutting the cord" with cable TV and watching shows via streaming devices.

So who knows how many people are actually watching Masterchef every Wednesday? TV By The Numbers says about 4 million viewers which is less than half of the 10 million viewers that tuned in for America's Got Talent. But that doesn't include those people who catch the show On Demand or via streaming devices.

But chances are the ad revenues for Masterchef are considerably less than the $60 million of a few years ago. Because TV shows are trying to stay relevant on places like Snapchat and Periscope. The format for Masterchef doesn't lend itself to expansion to these sites. It also doesn't work well for that segment of the audience who likes to binge-watch a TV show.

Right now, FOX loves Gordon Ramsay because he fills a hole in their schedule for their broadcast shows, but Masterchef and Hell's Kitchen are pretty limited products. Nobody at the network really cares who wins. As long as the show continues to receive at least a million viewers a week, FOX will be happy.

"However, if that person was not well liked or didn't think that person deserved it, then not buying their cookbooks will lose the Masterchef producers, company a snot-load of money, no?"

They only care about people tuning in. It doesn't matter if they're hated or not, otherwise people like Howard Stern would have been fired decades ago.

"I know it's a reality show and only Gordon and Christine get paid, but they get paid a lot don't they?"

The contestants get paid a small amount of money per episode. Other reality tv stars have confirmed this. I'm sure it varies from show to show, so I can't say anything more than that.

I agree with Gingersnap, the cookbook is just another way for them to make more money after the fact.

I probably won't buy another cook book from a show like this. The Top Chef one is nothing special. I thought the Chopped cook book would be more interesting, but it's not. Although, I would suggest Graham Elliot's "Cooking Like A Masterchef"

--Will.