Authors or publishers: If you’re interested in pursuing your fortunes in video, you might turn your attention to Amazon, which has just launched a YouTube-like service. For people who jump onboard early, Amazon is providing a juicy incentive: a pool of $1 million per month (sound familiar, Kindle Unlimited authors?) for the creators of the 100 most popular videos.
Most people are probably familiar with Amazon’s video service: you can buy or rent TV shows and movies, and you can watch some programming for free if you’re a Prime subscriber. (There are an estimated 54 million Prime subscribers in the United States.)
Amazon’s new Video Direct service allows any individual or business to distribute videos to the Amazon customer base through four different models:
- Offer your videos for digital rental or purchase; earn 50 percent of the retail price.
- Make your videos available for free to all customers, with advertising, and earn 55 percent of the ad revenue (same as YouTube).
- Distribute to Prime Video subscribers and earn 15 cents per hour streamed in the US or 6 cents per hour in other territories.
- Sell your content as an add-on subscription through Amazon’s Partners Program; earn 50 percent of the retail price.
Why would Amazon make this move? Well, there’s tremendous growth and demand in online video right now, with advertisers eager to spend money on it. YouTube alone is expected to bring in $1.88 billion in advertising in 2016, up from $770 million in 2013. Industry wide, US advertising spend on digital video is expected to grow nearly 30 percent this year, reaching almost $10 billion in 2016, according to eMarketer. Everyone is angling for a piece of the pie; even Facebook is hiring celebrities to produce original video content.
Bottom line: Amazon doesn’t have anywhere close to YouTube’s audience—the latter has more than 1 billion viewers monthly and is the second most visited website in the world, right behind Google. However, Amazon is where creators typically go to make money, and Amazon is positioning its video service as a place where professionals go. It will be an interesting game to watch.
Editor’s note: The eMarketer link is updated annually and may not reflect 2016 data.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
