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 …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron