# Amazon Prime Royalties



## Rasoul Morteza (Aug 20, 2020)

As the title suggests, does anyone have any experience collecting royalties from medium sized budget projects (around 300K) aired on Amazon Prime?

It's hard to know anything as SOCAN has no OTT share calculator. 

Cheers


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## chillbot (Aug 20, 2020)

Do you mean Amazon Video-On-Demand (VOD) or is Prime somehow different?

If it's Amazon VOD I would sadly not get too excited about it, it is one of the worst of all the streaming services (which is not a good thing to be), at least in the US via BMI.


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## Rasoul Morteza (Aug 20, 2020)

chillbot said:


> Do you mean Amazon Video-On-Demand (VOD) or is Prime somehow different?
> 
> If it's Amazon VOD I would sadly not get too excited about it, it is one of the worst of all the streaming services (which is not a good thing to be), at least in the US via BMI.


Amazon Prime Video.

Putting aside their abysmal per hour rate, is what you're saying stemming from your own personal experience or hearsay?

Although frankly I doubt I'll accept the project. If writers share freaks them out then I'm not interested in indulging myself in incompetency. You just can't say you're putting in $400,000 on 240m of cheap footage but no upfront fees?

Cheers


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## jcrosby (Aug 21, 2020)

I can speak from experience. You might get a couple cases of middle of the road beer out Amazon VOD in the same quarter where TV broadcasts are paying the bills. Not heresay, and not joking... Amazon really is one of if not the worst in the lot.


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## NoamL (Aug 21, 2020)

ASCAP here... Did some math and I've received about $5 from Amazon VOD for every $1,000 that network TV pays. Who knows how individual circumstances affect that, but... it's not good. The up front pay better be worth it to you, or maybe Prime needs to be significantly better paying than VOD.


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## Rasoul Morteza (Aug 21, 2020)

Thank you for the suggestions peeps. I'll have to dig a lot deeper into how good Amazon Prime is because it seems you are mostly talking about VOD. Maybe they share the same system maybe not, I don't know really.

Cheers


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## Nils Neumann (Aug 21, 2020)

NoamL said:


> ASCAP here... Did some math and I've received about $5 from Amazon VOD for every $1,000 that network TV pays. Who knows how individual circumstances affect that, but... it's not good. The up front pay better be worth it to you, or maybe Prime needs to be significantly better paying than VOD.



That’s harsh


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## chillbot (Aug 21, 2020)

Rasoul Morteza said:


> Thank you for the suggestions peeps. I'll have to dig a lot deeper into how good Amazon Prime is because it seems you are mostly talking about VOD. Maybe they share the same system maybe not, I don't know really.


I am fairly certain that "Amazon VOD" is just how BMI and ASCAP refer to Amazon Prime. Slight chance I could be wrong. I made $1,800 bucks last quarter from Amazon VOD so it's not completely hopeless. But that was for almost 400 pages of my statement.

From my personal experience (your mileage may vary) I would rank the streaming royalties in this order:

*GOOD*
Hulu
CBS All Access
Fox Now

*OK*
Netflix

*TERRIBLE*
Youtube
Amazon VOD
Microsoft VOD
Sony VOD

Getting off on a tangent but I make a fair amount of money from streaming, it's not as bad as @NoamL would make it out to be on a per-viewer basis. Consider this: yes it may be shit compared to network royalties, but the network has to actually choose to air your show for you to get royalties, and in a lot of cases (such as reality TV) that show will never re-air. With streaming, people can continually choose to watch your show and generate passive income for you.


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## NoamL (Aug 21, 2020)

Yes on a per viewer basis it's probably not 150x worse, because the network TV show could feasibly have had 150x the audience as when it went on VOD; I don't know.


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## Rasoul Morteza (Aug 21, 2020)

chillbot said:


> I am fairly certain that "Amazon VOD" is just how BMI and ASCAP refer to Amazon Prime. Slight chance I could be wrong. I made $1,800 bucks last quarter from Amazon VOD so it's not completely hopeless. But that was for almost 400 pages of my statement.
> 
> From my personal experience (your mileage may vary) I would rank the streaming royalties in this order:
> 
> ...


Great information, appreciated.


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## SamC (Sep 10, 2020)

Same experience with Amazon here, fairly dismal. Let’s just hope when the entire world switches to streaming we get a bit of legislation changed. Either that or the upfront fees go up. Both backend and upfront dropping isn’t a good sign though...


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## NoamL (Nov 9, 2020)

Just to button up this topic, I recently received ASCAP royalties for "Amazon Prime" and for "Amazon VOD" for _roughly_ the same amount of placements.... eyeballing it, it appears that the VOD royalties are on the order of 1/200th of the Amazon Prime royalties per minute. And exactly as @chillbot said, HULU paid much better than either. So did Disney Plus!


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## SamC (Nov 14, 2020)

chillbot said:


> I am fairly certain that "Amazon VOD" is just how BMI and ASCAP refer to Amazon Prime. Slight chance I could be wrong. I made $1,800 bucks last quarter from Amazon VOD so it's not completely hopeless. But that was for almost 400 pages of my statement.
> 
> From my personal experience (your mileage may vary) I would rank the streaming royalties in this order:
> 
> ...



Reality TV will never re-air? My royalty statements are filled to the brim of constant re-airings of reality tv shows. Thousands per quarter. Ironically that’s probably what’s been the death of cable/network tv though.


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## chillbot (Nov 14, 2020)

SamC said:


> Thousands per quarter.



Super happy you got your brim filled.

I was just using "reality tv" as an example and I meant it in the more traditional game-show definition with contestants, not the docu-dramas that fill cable tv. It's super rare for any show such as Survivor, American Ninja Warrior, Dancing With The Stars, Hell's Kitchen, Amazing Race, The Bachelor, etc, to re-air on network tv but they are available to stream whenever anyone wants to.


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## SamC (Nov 14, 2020)

chillbot said:


> Super happy you got your brim filled.
> 
> I was just using "reality tv" as an example and I meant it in the more traditional game-show definition with contestants, not the docu-dramas that fill cable tv. It's super rare for any show such as Survivor, American Ninja Warrior, Dancing With The Stars, Hell's Kitchen, Amazing Race, The Bachelor, etc, to re-air on network tv but they are available to stream whenever anyone wants to.



No worries, I know the likes of Real Housewives, Pawn Stars, etc make some dudes/ladies a lot of money.

Unfortunately, I don’t see a lot of streaming royalties for the shows you mentioned.

It’s interesting to see the types of shows people willingly watch on cable, even as background noise “because it’s on” but wouldn’t think to watch it on demand.

I hope your experiences with streaming can be widespread — sounds like you’ve done great! Hulu, etc does sound quite promising. Hopefully other streaming platforms will follow suit.


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## Rasoul Morteza (Jan 13, 2021)

roccodunhamm said:


> Amazon does not pay for my royalties too...I don't understand why...I have all the proofs in my hands. They just do not give a clear explanation. I have plenty of sells products are best-sellers but I get NO royalties..this is crazy!!! I feel terrible.


What does your PRO say?


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