Month: November 2021

Creator economy on balance

The key hits:

• The development of the creator economy has helped to empower individual video creators in their dealings with companies that have built businesses around creators.
• That marks a change from a decade ago when companies operating networks of creators’ YouTube channels held the upper hand, especially over smaller creators.
• However, smaller creators remain at a disadvantage in a crowded market, retaining a role for companies like MCNs.

The power balance between individual video creators and the traditional entertainment industry is shifting, and so is the one between creators and the companies they use — and that use them — to sell ads, sponsorships and other revenue streams, like content licensing and subscriptions.

“We’re watching the historical evolution of the digital landscape. When [so-called multichannel networks managing networks of YouTube creators’ channels] first sprang up and came on the scene, they were the gateway for talent to get any infrastructure or footing into the industry itself,” said Jake Webb, founder and president of talent management firm Slash Management, which manages creators like Nikita Dragun, who has 3.6 million subscribers on YouTube and 14.2 million followers on TikTok. 

Fast-forward to today, and the creator economy boom is rebalancing the creator business. A flood of companies have joined MCNs in building businesses around creators, and the added competition has helped to empower creators. At the same time, though, a deluge of creators means that an equilibrium has yet to be reached between creators and creator economy companies.

Seven years ago, the situation was significantly different. During the 2014 edition of VidCon — think Comic-Con but for creators and their fans — I moderated a panel featuring YouTube stars including Hannah Hart, John Green and Devin “DevinSupertramp” Graham. The panel was designed for these creators to advise an audience of aspiring creators on how they should manage their eventual businesses. The most common piece of advice I remember the creators offering was to beware working with MCNs, or, because these companies took a cut of creators’ revenue — usually 15% to 30% — but often did not provide enough of an uptick in revenue over YouTube’s standard ad revenue-share program to offset the MCNs’ cut.

“A lot of times for YouTubers who have smaller audiences, the deals [with MCNs] are less good. And they’re longer-term. And they can be not advantageous to the creator,” Green said during the panel.

In the intervening years, the landscape changed. Creators accrued larger audiences and expanded to newer platforms, and what was once an industry dominated by MCNs sprung into the creator economy that grew to include companies providing platforms and tools for creators to more directly manage their own businesses. Meanwhile, creators hired talent managers and signed with Hollywood talent agencies and realized their roles as CEOs of their own individualized media companies.

“The balance of power is shifting. When the MCNs first came about, it was a way to give creators more power against the whims of the digital ad markets, which were being consolidated by Facebook and YouTube,” said Andrew Cohen, manager at strategic advisory firm RockWater. Then as more companies entered the creator economy, creators had more options of which companies to work with. “I definitely think creators have a lot more leverage and freedom and mobility to pick out how they’re choosing to monetize their fandom,” he said.

Companies in the creator economy today, as a result, appear to be more accommodating to creators. Tastemade, for example, is allowing creators to keep their subscriber lists if they ever choose to opt out of the food-and-travel media company’s new subscription sales program. Others like Jellysmack — which would be labeled an MCN a decade ago but bills itself as a creator company — are lauded for following through on their pitches to help creators expand from a platform like YouTube to others like Facebook with minimum effort and incremental revenue in return. “Jellysmack is one of the perfect examples of someone the industry is embracing because they’re executing well,” said Webb.

It also helps that there seems to be much more competition among companies to take part in creators’ businesses. In addition to MCNs, there are influencer marketing networks and influencer marketing platforms — which are admittedly difficult to distinguish from one another, let alone from MCNs — as well as companies that specialize in various corners of the creator economy, such as merchandise, affiliate revenue, subscriptions and events. As of mid-October, 101 creator economy companies in the U.S. had collectively raised at least $3.7 billion this year, according to The Information.

This swelling of the space has enabled creators to pick-and-choose particular companies to work with rather than go all-in with any one company. However, the creator economy boom has also corresponded with a ballooning number of creators, meaning that not all are seeing the balance of power tip in their favor.

“I wouldn’t necessarily say there’s been a shift. The issues and conflicts that you’re describing from that [mid-2010s] time period still exist,” said Justin Miclat, CEO of talent management firm The Kinetic Group

While top creators’ businesses have blossomed, the ranks of up-and-coming creators have bloomed to the point of becoming overgrown. There were 50 million creators in the market in 2020, according to venture capital firm SignalFire. However, only around 2 million of those creators have made this their full-time job, with the remainder making some money as creators but not enough to make a living. This crowding has created a dynamic that recalls some aspects of MCNs’ raison d’être. Just as creators sought out MCNs to stand out from the pack and attract the bigger bucks, creators today are struggling to be discovered among an ever-expanding working class of creators.

So, for as much as may have changed over the past decade, there remains a role today for companies like MCNs and others that have built businesses around creators. As Miclat said, “If you’re looking at [a creator economy company], look at what marketing and promotion they’re providing to creators. Otherwise we can do it all ourselves — and that’s the biggest difference now versus a decade ago.”

What we’ve heard

“We don’t expect it to pay back in days like paid search might but we’re not letting TV off the hook entirely.”

— Drizly CMO Scott Braun on how the alcohol delivery service is monitoring its TV ads’ return on investment

Stay tuned: YouTube’s subscriber shortcut

YouTube Shorts may be little more than the dominant digital video platform’s attempt to head off TikTok’s growth, but YouTube’s short-form video product is also proving to be a way for YouTube channels to grow their followings on the platform.

In the past three months, the YouTube channel for ESPN’s SportsNation has attracted 1.5 million (non-paying) subscribers thanks almost exclusively to YouTube Shorts, according to Omar Raja, who founded House of Highlights before joining ESPN as an on-camera talent and social strategist in January 2020.

“It’s all Shorts. Same thing with my channel. I think I have a couple long uploads, but those were kind of tests,” said Raja. “Will we eventually incorporate longform videos? Yes. But right now it definitely is something where it seems like Shorts are a major key for growth.”

TikTok star Dylan Lemay has similarly used YouTube Shorts almost exclusively to build up his YouTube presence, which now totals 2.7 million subscribers. As Lemay recounted in an interview in August with YouTube creators Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry, “Shorts changed the game. People worked for, like, 10 years to get 100,000 subscribers. I feel bad a lot of the time that I did it so fast, because these people grinded forever, but the game has just changed.”

ESPN’s and Lemay’s experiences with YouTube Shorts seems to help answer a question that another media executive asked about YouTube’s TikTok clone: What’s the value of YouTube Shorts for a video maker? “It’s hard to make an investment there because there’s no direction. Give us some info, YouTube,” said the media executive. Platform-provided directives may be absent, but Shorts-driven subscribers appear to be in abundance.

Numbers to know

$33 billion: How much money Disney will spend on content in its current fiscal year, which runs through September 2022.

10%: Percentage decline year-over-year in ESPN’s pay-TV footprint, which has fallen to 76 million U.S. households.

100 million: Number of streaming subscribers in the U.S. that Disney is estimated to have reached in the fourth quarter of 2021.

What we’ve covered

How publishers like ESPN are assessing their TikTok videos’ performance:

• Video makers are looking beyond the standard view count to evaluate their TikTok videos.
• They are focusing on metrics like average completion rate, the growth rate of views and the percentage of views from non-followers.

Read more about publishers’ TikTok analyses here.

TV, CTV now the ‘biggest single channel’ of advertising for alcohol delivery service Drizly:

• Drizly is applying a “branded response” approach to its TV and CTV campaigns.
• The brand is butting up against how long it can take to determine the return on investment for TV ads.

Read more about Drizly here.

How TikTok is becoming a staple in Dr. Squatch’s social spend:

• The men’s natural personal care company has spent 10% to 15% of its ad budget over the past year on TikTok.
• Roughly 15% of the customers Dr. Squatch acquires come from TikTok.

Read more about Dr. Squatch here.

What we’re reading

YouTube TV adds free channels:
YouTube TV is by no means among the free, ad-supported streaming TV services like Roku’s The Roku Channel and ViacomCBS’s Pluto TV, but YouTube’s streaming pay-TV does play somewhat in the FAST market. YouTube TV is talking with Brat TV, Pocket.watch and Vox Media about adding the companies’ free streaming channels to its paid service, according to The Information. YouTube TV has an established track record of not paying the traditional pay-TV carriage fees to carry some channels from digital media companies, and these latest talks appear to be the service’s attempt to add more programming without further raising its subscription price, which has been going up anyway to account for the traditional pay-TV channels it carries.

TV news networks’ streaming dilemma:
Streaming is the consensus future of TV news, as it is for TV in general. But that future comes with the cost of a short-term revenue hit that TV news networks are still sorting through how to swallow, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The TV news networks are increasingly making streaming an equal priority to traditional TV. However, what they still have to account for — especially those relying upon free, ad-supported streaming properties — is how they will offset the lost revenue from pay-TV carriage fees.

Amazon eyes bigger NFL bet:
Amazon has established itself as the tech giant most committed to streaming NFL games. Now, after securing exclusive rights to Thursday Night Football, the company is looking to acquire a 49% stake in the NFL’s media arm, which operates the league’s TV networks, according to Front Office Sports. While Amazon would not be taking majority ownership of NFL Network and RedZone, the deal could position the company to put the channels on its Prime Video, IMDb TV and/or Twitch streaming services and potentially pull them from traditional and streaming pay-TV providers.

​​This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

What has your experience been with DE&I at work as a queer person?

I’ve worked at PR firms for years and years and years. It wasn’t until I worked at [my last company] that I saw someone like me reflected in the senior leadership team. That was the first time I saw an out gay man on the leadership team. I don’t think I ever realized the impact that that had. Years ago, I was working on a Barbie launch. There was a video where a young Black girl [was] looking at Barbie and it was a Barbie who was a Black woman. She was like, “It looks just like me.” That was really poignant. But in that moment, I don’t think I related to it on a personal level. Then I remember going to [my last company] and seeing this executive and thinking, “Wow, I know I’m on an upward trajectory of my own career.” I don’t think I realized that I could reach that level because I never saw someone like me in that type of position.

How has that experience and others throughout your career impacted how you see intersectionality?

I can’t change the past. I can’t change decades of feeling a certain way. It’s almost ingrained in me. So today, I really make it a point to celebrate each and every person on my team. Not only acknowledge and understand the differences between us, but also to love and appreciate those differences. There are so many things I have in common with my colleagues, but there are also a lot of differences between us. And that’s nothing to shy away from anymore. When you recognize those differences, and use them to build a foundation and relationship with people, it’s really just such a beautiful thing. For a while, we were trying to put on this facade that we’re all the same deep down and I think to an extent that’s true. But I think it is very problematic when we’re not recognizing the differences between us.

Do you think intersectionality and inclusivity are things that got left behind in 2021?

There are definitely a lot of companies that I saw take similar steps last year and then call it a day. There have even been accounts, companies that I’ve worked on previously where I’ve seen them do it, specifically around pride month. To me, it felt like we were taking advantage of the community that I was part of. We were doing an influencer program with queer influencers. We donated to an LGBTQ nonprofit and then once July hit, that was completely taken off the table. Inclusivity didn’t really matter as much anymore. I wasn’t seeing queer influencers being included in any other programs later in the year. That’s always been a huge issue to me. There’s so much overlapping. A lot of these communities get caught in trying to check all these boxes. Are we hitting on this female demographic? Are we hitting on an LGBTQ demographic? But there are Black queer people. There are Hispanic bisexual people.

So where do we go from here?

The topic of DE&I stresses people out because it feels sometimes overwhelming. Is it an online training course? Is it bringing in an expert? But creating an inclusive environment can be really simple. One is being aware of your communication style and making sure how you are communicating in the workplace is in a way that promotes inclusion. One way to do this is making sure that you’re talking to every single person on your team on the same level. [Another is] creating an environment where all employees feel they can express their concerns, their feelings, their thoughts without judgment or prejudice. Celebrate the differences amongst everyone on your team.

Belsky shared his thoughts on Acadia’s role in the marketplace and how it’s going so far. 

This conversation has been edited for space and clarity:  

How did Acadia come together?

Sean, the co-founder, famously started a furniture e-commerce company called BizChair at the age of 14 — he went from selling Pokémon cards on eBay to selling $300 million in furniture going up against giants like Wayfair while you and me were partying in college. He sold that two years ago. After I left Dentsu, I was trying to think of my next chapter. I was surveying the market, and I started to realize something very simple and fundamental: the mid-market is growing in sophistication and growing in their dedication and focus in digital. 

What type of clients are you trying to recruit? 

The average CMO of a mid-market client has two problems. One, if they reached up for a larger agency, they may not have been important enough. The second problem is a far bigger conundrum. The CMO of fill-in-the-blank midsize DTC company gets an SEO agency, then an SEM agency, then an analytics agency, then a Shopify agency, a customer segmentation agency and an email agency. She has eight agencies and now has to integrate them, which she can’t because she has a staff of three. All that data lives in silos, so each of those agencies are making choices only to optimize their silo but not to optimize that CMO’s bottom line. The sophistication that CMO wants was either inaccessible or unaffordable. This CMO of the mid-market would want all that together, so that budget can move fluidly. And one agency would just steward the money to wherever the hot hand was. Spend has to follow where the ROAS is and not follow a special interest or SOWs.

The first time we did this [was] through acquisition. But we’ve been really lucky. This is our fourth acquisition and each one of the founders has stayed on because they’re part of our core leadership team. The founders have an absolute voice, their culture is intact, but we’re creating one culture around Acadia. The sub-brands are going away — it’s not a holding company. It’s a singular operating vision.

What are you trying to do differently? 

Using an iceberg analogy, our clients were always talking to us about issues that are above the waterline, saying something to us like, “We need help with Facebook and Instagram, our ROAS has gone down.” You’re hearing that from everyone because of iOS. That is an above-the-waterline issue. Below that waterline is the opportunity to do, say, multi-touch attribution or pathway analysis to better value the role of the Facebook impression. Below the waterline is an opportunity to look at lifetime value versus just same session ROAS. Below the waterline issue is the opportunity to better do customer segmentation and start talking to the right micro audiences, not just the general public. In other words, everyone just is complaining and saying, “Oh boohoo, Facebook and Instagram aren’t working.” No, push back! Push back with brilliance and leverage analytics. 

What’s still missing from your portfolio? 

The last official room that’s missing of that original vision to build a growth marketing platform for that modern mid-market marketer is retail media. Every dollar to clients is so precious. Retail media is a correct option if they have a good or a service that fits in there. So for us, that’s the next room of focus.

Digiday invited industry leaders and problem solvers to our Programmatic Marketing Summit from November 8-10 to discuss those pressing issues and what’s on the agenda for 2022, across three days in Miami.

While contextual is receiving a lot of attention right now, it’s not a singular solution to the loss of cookies. Clients in most industries — with notable exceptions like pharma and auto — see contextual as a value-add, rather than a strategic direction.

Tactically speaking, advertisers may reach for contextual as a known quantity, but this isn’t exactly a case of things coming full circle. Contextual today is a different beast, and Jill Kregel, vp of programmatic precision at Starcom, said clients are underestimating the full potential of what contextual technology has to offer.

“It’s not the contextual targeting of old,” Kregel said. “It’s not just like stick your search keywords in, put out a campaign and see what it can do. There’s so much more that is available.” Content-based contextual is just one tool that advertisers should be using, according to Kregel.

Workplaces in the programmatic space are feeling the crunch of the “Great Resignation.” Teams are shrinking as staff members leave their jobs — some are walking away from the industry altogether — and hiring is proving more challenging than anyone could have foreseen amid the furloughs and layoffs of the early days of the pandemic.

In this context, employee retention needs to be a top priority for managers and the C-suite. Alyssa Adelson, svp of talent acquisition at Known, gave us a glimpse into Known’s thinking around retention strategies. First, Adelson said she’s not a fan of the downbeat connotations of the term “Great Resignation” (and we’ve heard the same from other executives).

“In reality, we’re looking more at an employee revolution here,” Adelson said. “Everyone’s been home and this blending of their professional and personal life into one day has been evident for everyone. And they’re asking themselves, does this fit into my life? And does this fit into my career goals? And unfortunately, we’re seeing that answer is no for a lot of people.”

Known has not seen a significant exodus of employees, but she said the company has still been developing tools to maximize retention. One initiative is a culture onboarding program that all employees go through when they join Known. Paid vacations are another key incentive.

“All our employees get a $1,000 bonus when they put in [the] time, to take away,” Adelson said. “We really encourage our people to refresh, to step away.” That has benefits for both employees and for the company’s work. “One of our values is ‘never stop learning.’ If you can’t take the time to innovate and take that time to refresh, you become static,” Adelson explained. Above all, retention should start from a principle of being as agile as possible with employees, or what Adelson described as “being able to meet them where they are.”

“We could have a data scientist who really wants to be behind a keyboard, and that’s really where he or she thrives, or we might have a data scientist who really wants to be client-facing, and that’s okay,” Adelson said. “And that may change in the future. Their goals may change. And that’s a good thing.”

CTV is capturing the imagination of more clients than ever, with a broader range of inventory and attractive pricing persuading brands to at least test a CTV campaign or two. Prerna Talreja, Managing Director of Digital Activation at Crossmedia USA, offered a few tips to share with clients who are new to CTV. First, she said many clients who are already in linear TV are enticed to try CTV by package deals that incorporate both formats. However, to get the most from the incremental reach CTV can deliver, clients shouldn’t limit themselves solely to buying CTV ads with the networks they’re already buying linear ads with.

If possible, CTV deals should be negotiated as far in advance as possible. Nobody wants to FOMO their way into the market in Q4 and pay the top-end prices that go along with that. And while test-and-learn is great, Talreja said brands should go in clear-sighted about how they expect CTV to play into their overall strategy. CTV is an exciting space to watch, but brands need to stay invested across a broad range of platforms and formats.

“You’re not just testing for the sake of testing or just putting an impression out there or because it’s the new thing that you should be doing,” Talreja said. “But more so that you’re really understanding the role that the channel was playing in your buy, and how it can help drive someone through the entire funnel and journey.”

Several speakers at the summit touched on how players in the CTV sector are facing up to obstacles around fraud and brand safety that have given some clients cold feet. Agencies should use the full range of tools to maximize brand safety and cut out fraud, including dynamic exclude lists and filtering out certain SSPs and exchanges that aren’t delivering quality inventory.

Joe Kowan, EVP of Programmatic Precision at Spark Foundry, compared the company’s efforts to combat fraud to a game of Whack-A-Mole. “It really just becomes part of the discipline of operating in this space,” Kowan said. “And the advantages of operating through programmatic far outweigh the risks of operating within some kind of sketchy ad exchange that just popped up and has a fraud issue. It’s a matter of staying vigilant and keeping it in your daily checklist.” The optics around these issues are also important, and that’s something the industry appears to be getting right. Prerna Talreja, Managing Director of Digital Activation at Crossmedia USA, said that even if fraud still exists, the industry is at least showing responsiveness to the problem. “There are people talking about it. And there is a need and the industry wants solutions for it,” Talreja said.

One of the clearest trends we can see in programmatic right now is that walled gardens aren’t just here to stay – they are proliferating. Many publishers and platforms appear to have come to the conclusion that what’s good for the big tech giants is also good for them. With first-party data sure to be a powerful differentiating force in the cookieless future, companies like Walmart, Roku and Discovery and many more are building their own walled gardens.

Luke Lambert, Head of Activation at OMD USA, said more walled gardens isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “I think it gives us a better idea of who we’re talking to, I think the experience of the consumer really starts to improve,” Lambert said. “We need to embrace this.” “The walled gardens definitely introduce a challenge to cohesive measurement strategies,” said Joe Kowan. “But it’s not insurmountable.” Kowan agreed that any publisher who owns unique proprietary data is more likely than not to put it behind a walled garden and that advertisers are going to have to get used to working with multiple walled gardens.

The “Great Resignation”

As the economy opened up through 2021, a striking pattern emerged in the monthly job reports released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. On the one hand, employers in many industries were finding it difficult to staff their organizations back to anything like pre-COVID levels. On the other, month after month, millions of Americans were quitting their jobs. In September 2021 alone, a record 4.4 million people left their workplaces.

The phenomenon was quickly labeled the “Great Resignation,” although as we heard at the Summit, many programmatic executives reject that framing. Those employers tell us that the exodus of workers from the job market represents an assertion that work has to fit around their lives and priorities, rather than the reverse. We’ve heard mixed reports about how the Great Resignation is affecting programmatic workplaces, but many are reviewing their benefits packages and taking the opportunity to be introspective about how they can better accommodate employees’ needs.

“A programmatic trader or a programmatic campaign manager today is responsible for knowing too much about too many things. And so you have this shallow level of expertise across lots of different things. They can activate digital out-of-home, they can activate streaming audio or banner ads, but it’s too much for one person to be an expert.” – Geoffrey Litwer, VP of Programmatic and Display Media, Tinuiti

• As programmatic has grown, the scope of functions that a given team is responsible for has evolved to a degree that has become unwieldy. Geoffrey Litwer predicted that the industry will rethink the structure of teams as the industry grows, moving away from what he called the “Swiss Army Knife” approach to develop deeper expertise across channels, platforms and formats. Indeed, Litwer questioned whether the term “programmatic” is now an inadequate descriptor for what the industry does.

“I don’t ever say it – well, I’m going to say it but in air quotes – death to the cookie, or death of the cookie, or the ‘cookiepocalypse,’ they’re super negative. And that connotation I think is a miss, because this is a fantastic opportunity to start to level set across the open internet again, in to embrace new startups and new ideas and ways of operating that previously just kind of sat on the back burner because they weren’t priority.” – Luke Lambert, Head of Activation, OMD USA

• Luke Lambert argued that the demise of third-party cookies is typically described in language that casts this as a doomsday scenario. As a consequence, the discussion around how to replace cookies tends to be riddled with anxiety, fear, and frequently a sense of panic. Lambert argues that marketers should try to reframe the conversation to focus on the potential gains that the post-cookie era may bring.

“When you come from an organization where you are science and data-driven, combined with creative, innovation is key. And what fuels innovation and creativity is different perspectives and diversity. If you hire all the same people, where’s the innovation? – Alyssa Adelson, SVP, Talent Acquisition, Known

• Many teams and companies in the programmatic marketing space are still lacking in diversity. That’s not just an issue for employees of color, women, and potential hires – it also holds organizations back. Alyssa Adelson offered a timely reminder about the importance of hiring to ensure diversity of thought and life experience runs through your organization. Adelson said Known has reaped the rewards of diverse hiring practices, which have helped the company to build and retain a diverse client base.

Podcasting is one of the big emerging opportunities for programmatic advertisers. According to a recent report from Edison Research, 80 million Americans listen to podcasts each week. Edison expected ad revenue in the sector to top $1 billion for 2021.

While Amazon continues to play a defining role in most publishers’ affiliate commerce businesses, many publishers regard it warily. And in sizing up Amazon’s Live entreaties, many heard something that was unfocused and vague, with the only real clear priority being training publishers’ audiences to use Amazon Live, according to sources at four publishers that Amazon pitched. Those sources spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing an important business relationship.

“They had nothing to share about how to build an audience,” said one publisher source that discussed Amazon Live with Amazon.

While Amazon has offered up some money to ease the costs that come from producing live content, the amounts themselves often fell short of what would be required to produce high-quality live video at the scale that Amazon requested. One source said that, in exchange for four hours worth of live video every month, Amazon would pay less than $5,000. 

Over the past year and a half, the combination of extensive lockdowns, accelerated e-commerce activity and boredom have fueled speculation about the rise of live-streamed shopping, a consumer behavior that has grown commonplace in China but has yet to achieve mass consumer adoption in the United States. 

And over that time frame, Amazon has managed to turn Live into a meaningful source of revenue for some independent creators, with some pulling in tens of thousands of dollars during sales holidays such as Prime Day. 

But Amazon, which declined to comment on the record for this story, has never released information about how many creators, brands or publishers are creating content for Live. And publishers still have scars from their last platform-pitched foray into an unproven live video format (see Facebook Live). And with many reluctant to trust Amazon today, they are for the most part continuing to sit this out. 

“I don’t feel the need to push into the space before having that relative confidence that our efforts would produce something meaningful,” said a third source that Amazon pitched. “It felt like they really didn’t have it figured out for publishers just yet.” 

Sellers’ market(ing)

On one level, Amazon Live is simply the next step forward for its affiliate marketing program, Amazon Associates. Its dynamics will be familiar to any publisher: if an Amazon customer watches an Amazon Live video, then purchases one of the video’s featured products within a short period of time, the video’s creator gets a commission, which varies by product category. 

There is no set list of skills or qualifications needed to hawk goods on the internet. But the quality that Amazon seems most interested in is a large, distributed audience that can be driven into their platform. 

That interest has led to Live featuring some unlikely pitchmen, including Anthony William, better known as the Medical Medium, who came under recent scrutiny after some of his “miracle cures” became popular on Instagram, where he has 3.7 million followers. It may also explain how Alex and Alan Stokes, internet-famous twin brothers who recently pleaded guilty to misdemeanor false imprisonment charges after they pretended to rob a bank, came to find themselves on a recent Amazon Live shilling products including a facial steamer and a touch-screen toaster. 

In its outreach to publishers, Amazon stressed the importance of promoting their Live sessions on third-party platforms. 

Short shelf life, and uncertain returns

Not every publisher Digiday spoke with for this story saw a problem in that kind of arrangement. What was far more troubling, those sources said, was that Amazon would not give publishers any assurances about how much revenue Live sessions might bring in. “They were quite hesitant to put any dollar amounts in writing,” said a second source that discussed Live with Amazon. 

Publishers debating whether they should start creating Amazon Live content had to wrestle with another, related problem: The content has a short shelf life. While past Live streams are accessible on creators’ pages after they’ve been published, there is little mechanism for promoting them within Amazon. 

While publishers could plug or distribute links to old streams after they’d concluded, Amazon seems to have learned that there is little long-term value in the Live sessions themselves. 

“They even said: ‘There’s almost no money to be made after it’s done,’” that source said. 

Stampede at the gold rush

But if this combination of audience hunting and uncertain revenue has turned off most publishers, it has resonated with enough independent creators, whom Amazon began aggressively courting to join its influencer program. 

“Pretty much all of YouTube got recruited,” said one creator that distributes videos through both YouTube and Amazon.   

That recruitment has been part of a separate set of growing pains. For much of the past year, Amazon has been trying to revive a program that places publisher- and creator-produced videos about products on the corresponding pages about them inside product pages. 

Its compensation structure functioned the same as Amazon Live’s, and for many of the creators Amazon had recruited, the upside and results were much more favorable than what one might expect from an ad revenue-sharing program. “Per thousand views, we were getting a lot more,” that first creator said. 

But after a critical mass of creators discovered how Amazon’s video program worked, it was swamped with low-quality content that barely served the program’s purpose: Automatically generated videos with static images, joke videos, even videos featuring the wrong products. 

“People saw it as a cash grab,” a second creator said. “These weren’t even creators. These were just people who were gaming the system. You had people stealing one another’s videos, uploading duplicates.”  

Some publishers got caught in the middle. An executive at one publisher participating in that program, which said it generates less than $1,000 per month from it, said that the results were so abysmal that it colored their interest in Amazon Live. “If we’d had a much more positive experience, we’d be game for it,” the source said.