Amazon Cuts Prime Video Direct Royalty Rates for Indie Filmmakers… Again
Once more, Amazon have announced they will be cutting the royalty rates for independently uploaded content. Anyone who has signed up to upload their films to Amazon will have recently received an update email. In that email Amazon explain the reason for reducing payments.
“Throughout 2019, PVD (Prime Video Direct) received tens of thousands of new titles enjoyed by customers world wide. Customer Engagement Ranking (CER) has been used to successfully reward providers in the United States with higher royalties for content customers engage with most. As engagement and selection increases, so does the potential number of customers watching your content.
“Beginning January 1st, the Prime Subscription Access (Included with Prime) rate for content published through PVD will expand to pay royalties for titles assigned to the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, and Germany in accordance with a CER metric.
“Why is PVD making these changes?
The new rate structure allows us to align the Prime Subscription Access (Included with Prime) rate with the level of customer engagement created by each individual title or season. It rewards content customers enjoy and incentivizes providers to publish content customers love.”
Prime Video Direct
If you don’t already know, Amazon allow anyone who signs up as a content provider to upload videos. While it’s not quite as simple as uploading to Vimeo or YouTube, it’s not far off. Inevitably, this means Amazon has been flooded with content from all kinds of filmmakers around the world.
As I’ve spoken about before, while people watching YouTube know what to expect in terms of variable quality, Amazon Prime subscribers are mostly expecting Netflix level content. This puts pressure on Amazon to try to enforce some kind of quality control on uploads, in a way YouTube and other platforms certainly don’t.
Amazon are basically caught somewhere between channels which only provide formally purchased content (like Netflix) and free uploaders like YouTube. Prime Video Direct is basically the video version of their self publishing platform for writers, where again anyone can upload a book to sell via Kindle.
Undoubtedly, Kindle Direct Publishing has been a huge success for Amazon, helping to drive traffic to Amazon during the early stages of their ascent to one of the “Big Four” giant tech companies. Why? Because Amazon do very little to promote your book, therefore self-publishers have to drive most of their own traffic.
The same goes for your video. It’s up to the self-distributing filmmaker to find a way to get attention for their film on Amazon. Therefore, Amazon benefit because every one of these filmmaker is one more unpaid member of Amazon’s PR department.
Customer Engagement Ranking
For Amazon, the benefits of this free PR are undeniable.
As far as Amazon is concerned, every film watcher sent by a filmmaker to their low budget movie page is a potential Amazon Prime subscriber. They’ll watch your film, cool. But then maybe they’ll get attracted to some other Prime titles. Or maybe they’ll remember they need some new kitchen utensils…
On the other hand, Amazon wants to keep their Prime subscribers happy. And allowing Prime Video to be flooded with low budget content is more likely to drive them away. Especially those who signed up only for the Prime Video service (as opposed to the other benefits, like free delivery).
Therefore, Amazon have attempt to strike a delicate balance between the free PR (and essentially free video content) and pissing off Prime members. To make this happen they have a thing called the Customer Engagement Ranking (CER).
Amazon say the “Customer Engagement Ranking (CER) is a percentile ranking of a title’s level of engagement with our Prime customers in relation to other Included with Prime (SVOD) titles published via Prime Video Direct within a single territory.”
But what does this mean?
Why don’t Amazon just go by the number of minutes viewed as an indication of customer engagement? Surely, if everyone is paid at the same rate, those who get most minutes watched get most money. Whereas Amazon’s CER system might seem unfairly weighted against self-publishing filmmakers.
Amazon go on to say: “It is calculated using a number of factors, including the relative popularity of your title in our catalog and measures of customer engagement such as streamed hours.”
Now, below is the important stuff from the Amazon website:
“Factors that contribute to CER
CER takes into consideration multiple customer signals which could include:
- Unique Customers Current and new Prime members who view your title.
- Streamed Hours The time each customer spends engaging with your content.
- Title Popularity Notable talent, relevant genres, an IMDb presence and rating, and box office performance.
- Title Caliber Compelling and high-quality poster art, accurate and representative copy and metadata, localized subtitles and key art. For more information, review the publishing steps for standalone and episodic titles, art requirements, and caption (timed text) information.”
What they’re saying is, the amount of hours their customers spend watching your content is not enough to indicate the value of it. For that reason, there’s a whole bunch of other factors with which they’ll rank your film. That rank will then be used to calculate how much you earn an hour.
We can take it that what we see described above is Amazon’s wish list. In other words, “please send us more content like that on Netflix and less like that on YouTube.” Or another way of putting it, “If you upload what we deem to be YouTube quality video, we’ll pay you less for it.”
In addition, they want to encourage PVD users to put more effort into the presentation of their films. Better poster art, better subtitles and so on. In fact, this (and much more) is what a film distributor would expect from us as filmmakers, anyway. Then again, distributors expect that because they’re paying you for it whereas Amazon are paying you exactly nothing (other than royalties).
Having said that, aside from “notable talent”, most of the rest is within our capabilities, if we put the time into it.
Appearances Count
Now, we understand a bit more about what’s motivating Amazon to reduce rates and apply their CER system. A lot of the factors they’re asking for are essentially adding polish to PVD titles. And when your subscribers are expecting Netflix level content, encouraging uploaders to develop the appearance of their titles makes sense.
Also, bear in mind Amazon now owns IMDb. If your film is listed on IMDb and is uploaded to Amazon Prime, a link will appear sending IMDb users from your title to it’s Amazon page. Again, the idea is to encourage PVD users to do more PR work for Amazon. And they also want you to send more traffic to their subsidiary IMDb, of course.
Here are the new rates, starting from January 1, 2020.
Are you an PVD self-publisher?
If you use the service, how to do you feel about the new rates? Nobody using the service is going to be happy, of course. But I would love to know your feelings on this and other opinions and experiences of self-distribution. Certainly, distribution is a tough game, no matter what your budget.
But how do you feel?
Eager to learn more?
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This is a timely article as I’ve just been looking into this, so thank you, Simon!
The figures are pretty depressing for filmmakers hoping to make a few bucks from all their hard work. Outside of PVD do we know how much content owners receive when a title is bought or rented by non-Prime users? I understand Amazon rates will be updated January 2020 as well, but wondered if anyone knows what we can expect?
hi Caroline. Never good news to hear we get paid less. Regarding renting or purchasing films, filmmakers can set their own price. Down to $0.99 at the lowest I think
This was simply a smart way of getting rid of the ultra low budget indie filmmakers.
I can’t imagine why any filmmaker would allow their film on Amazon Prime at those rates… all it does is devalue your film, I think what Amazon is hoping for will accomplish just the opposite… if your film sucks and it has no market then what would one have to lose if amazon pays essentially nothing…. If you film is good, Leave your film on rent and purchase, then you can make some money… As it stands the good content on Prime is few and far between, and you can only expect it to get worse from this move…..
This is precisely why I put my film, “Confessions of a Teenage Satanist”, on for rent or purchase only. This film won the “Best Horror Feature Film” at the 2019 Marina Del Rey Film Festival. I think it will have a high CER rating just in case I will place it for free viewing in Amazon Prime. It has a good IMDb presence.
At present, with so much content being made, independent filmmakers have to be savvy in marketing. It forces us to get out of our shell and connect with potential viewers. Please remember also that there is such a thing as “Guerilla Marketing”. So far, after only a week, I’m happy with the film’s performance in PVD. Thanks for this article.
What are the other presentation options for filmmakers other than Amazon that are known and popular with the public? Its tricky to guage in reality potential revenue for a title looking at 0.07 p per hour. So can anyone offer examples or case studies or an give an idea of potential revenue of say a 60 minute documentary so we can guage potential revenue…say 3 levels of popularity? Doe it mean if 1000 people whatched your doc you would get 1000 x £0.07?
*gauge
*watch
No glasses!
It seems the only use for Prime is to get some exposure. At least my shorts get some views there., as opposed to Vimeo or YouTube where they get zero views (unless you build some kind of audience yourself). 6 cents per hour was never going to make me rich but I thought at least with many titles I could get a little extra change.
And again (October 2020)…. oh boy, this is not for the indie-filmmaker anymore……. I earn like 2 cents now, when someone watches my feature film………………………sorry, but it’s coming to a point, where preparing and uploading the whole thing to amazon costs more than you can make…………………….I might as well sell just a handfull of DVDs during live events…….less hassle, 500x more revenue per unit…………………………….the one thing Amazon seems to offer these days is exposure, and I think at some point they will actually charge for that………………I’m seriously considering to just borrow a car and tour the country showing my films…………………..more fun and probably more money (definetlely not less….)……… let’s see how things develop……………………….
Lots of luck Have not seen a payment in a year from amazon. even did test buys (rentals) nope they are just keeping the money. I know for certain that two of the titles have had many rentals as Imdb popularity went very high first 6 months of covid. No worth dealing with Amazon.
I uploaded my acclaimed indie film in late September 2021. To date the film has over 5 million minutes streamed. I have kept a daily log taking screenshots of the performance metrics from Oct through Nov 2021. I was shocked at the ridiculously low royalty.of less than $200.00. I realize Amazon does not pay by the minute but by how many hours streamed but even so with 5 million minutes streamed shouldn’t that should be considered decent engagement? I wrote to customer service believing there was a mistake in their calculations and they said that because they consider my film to have a “low engagement” that is the correct payout. Amazon you are sleazy scum bags taking advantage of indie filmmakers. Perhaps it’s time for a class action lawsuit.