A new Amazon program called Amazon Video Direct (or AVD) lets video creators post content to Amazon’s video hub, which already serves over 50 million paid Amazon Prime subscribers in the US alone.
According to tubefilter:
AVD users can post and monetize their videos in various ways. If added to the Amazon Prime library, for instance, creators can reap royalties based on hours streamed. Creators can also monetize by offering their content via one-off rentals or purchases, or even monthly subscriptions. And finally, in a move that brings Amazon squarely into competition with 10-year-old YouTube, it will allow creators to share revenues from ad impressions.
Just like YouTube’s revenue split, Amazon will keep 45% of ad earnings, according to The Wall Street Journal. It will take 50% of revenues from rentals, purchases, and subscriptions, and pay content holders 15 cents for every hour streamed in the U.S. on Amazon Prime. (AVD is also available in Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom, and Japan, where creators will get 6 cents for every hour streamed on Prime.)
And there’s a bonus, literally. According to Amazon, the company “will distribute a share of $1,000,000 per month as a bonus to the Top 100 titles included with Prime through Amazon Video Direct. This bonus—based on global customer engagement—is incremental to revenue earned from hours streamed, rentals, purchases, monthly subscriptions, and ad impressions. All of your titles included with Prime are automatically eligible.”
Do you think Amazon Prime subscribers are hungry for independent music content? Can AVD compete with YouTube as a music video and discovery platform? Let us know in the comments below.
Chris Robley is an acclaimed singer-songwriter and award-winning poet from Maine.
His Beatlesque indie-pop and milltown Americana songs have been praised by The Associated Press, No Depression, KCRW, The LA Times, Boston Globe, NPR, American Songwriter, and others.
His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, The Poetry Review, and more.
Robley has received a Maine Literary Award in Poetry, Boulevard’s Emerging Writers Prize for Poetry, and in 2016 was selected by former US-poet laureate Robert Pinsky as a finalist for the Dorset Prize.