Why Viewers Should Be Mad That Amazon is Paying Creators Less

This past month Amazon Video Direct (Now "Prime Video Direct") has moved "partners" to a tiered payment plan for content.  Whereas before titles were paid a set amount per hour viewed, now they are paid a floating amount, depending on how much they're viewed over the course of a set amount of time.  Effectively, smaller or older titles, stuck in tier one, will be earning about 65% less than they did last year.

Why the change?

According to the email Amazon sent me, this is to reward "more engaging" content.  The more people who watch a title, and they longer they watch it for, the more that title will earn per viewing  minute.  On the face of it, this seems like a reward for good content (or at least content the consumer wants) and makes sense.  

There is a flaw in this reasoning, however.  Since to move from tier one to tier two a movie must accumulate 100,000 hours in views, features can climb tiers more easily than shorts despite actual "engagement".   Let me give an example.  For the sake of ease, let's make our feature 2 hours long.  People start it because it has good cover art, but they fast forward through the boring bits and stop watching before the end because there's too many boring bits.  On average our fictional viewers watch an hour of the feature.  If 100,000 people do this, the movie will become a tier two money maker with only 50% engagement.

Now, a short film, 10 minutes in length, would have to be watched 6 times to equal one hour.  Let's assume for our example that nearly everyone loves it!  and 500,000 people watch it all the way through.  That's 100% engagement from 5x as many people, but the movie remains on the lower pay tier because of it's short format.  

The math doesn't fit the logic behind it.

Why should viewers care?

For "fringe" filmmakers, such as myself, this poses a conundrum.  On the Amazon Platform, unless we build our audiences up a great deal, for every title, the reward is going to be significantly less and it will definitely be less after six months or a year, when Amazon has added many new titles and ours drops back into the void.  

This leaves us two options:
1. Make movies with more mass appeal.

2. Make cheaper movies and shows.

As a viewer you have plenty of other platforms providing the top end of Hollywood and mainstream pictures.  The thing that was neat about Amazon Prime working with indies is that you could fish through some pretty unusual stuff.  Now, what you're left with, dear viewer with the slightly odd taste, is a bunch of filmmakers either trying to compete for mainstream viewers or having to take less risk to match the smaller reward they stand to reap.

Amazon recently raised the prices for Prime Membership and they're paying your content providers less.  You're being asked to spend more money while they force content creators to consider cutting costs.

Back to basics.

For me, the decision is easy.  I have a lot of scripts already written with only a few characters and some very basic locations.  These are now getting moved to the top of my production list.  It's going to hurt a bit to not be able to fly in the best fit for a role when I know I wrote a part for someone specific, but  spending more on the movie than it will make back in a reasonable amount of time is just bad business.  I'm not totally against bad business, but I do try to minimize it.

How can you help?

If you have a favorite show, movie, short or whatever on Amazon, YouTube, Vimeo, iTunes, Hulu or Netflix, share it.  Post about it.  Review it on that platform (even with a short few lines).  All of these demonstrate "engagement" and move the titles forward in searches.  After that, if others want to watch it, it can help keep the earning numbers up, allowing for future shows to be budgeted more appropriately. 

Don't watch movies on pirate sites.  Don't encourage others to do it either.

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