Amazon
Amazon is the largest E-commerce site on the planet, peddling billions worth of products every year and thriving most evidently from the Long Tail Theory. However, Amazon as an entity is one of the key contributors to the decline of retail as a viable market with next to everything you could possibly want being available either through the warehouse directly or from a third party affiliate with the majority of items sporting free delivery as well. It is no surprise then that with a centralized market undercutting the prices substantially of the physical storefronts that it too has a huge role in the way the film industries chose to sell their products. The featured top 5 list is a prime space to be if you want your DVD, CD or Blu-Ray to rake in mainstream levels of revenue.
With an industry as sprawling as film and a site as accommodating as Amazon, the movies and entertainment section is one of the strongest pathways for consumers to find you. Of course, ranking high in the Amazon search is a must and with a name like SYNTH the title is easily findable for it's audience, however, the dizzying excess of the Disney Empire has made it increasingly difficult to get smaller titles featured on the main page however the user recommendations section will use trends in buyer patterns to recommend profitable and niche films, making it more likely to sell by the virtue of exposure to a target demographic. This is where the Amazon HUB comes into play, allowing customers to browse based on certain categories such as Horror or award winning, essentially, the greater number of related categories SYNTH falls into, the more likely it is to reach it's target audience and generate a profit.
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Amazon is also a great tool for discovering what is currently popular with the 'Shop By Department' and 'Hot Releases' features in particular making it very easy to see what the public is currently buying, watching and saying. By shopping by the horror section, we can see that the majority of purchased horror flicks on Amazon are either soft Teen horror much to my own disappointment or television goliaths like The Walking Dead (although one has to wonder if it's popularity happens to coincide with the wrap up of Season 6). This is slightly disconcerting knowing that physical items are tending more towards the existing franchises rather than new IP like SYNTH but at the same time, the majority of popular horror films do well in cinemas and gain cult acclaim thanks to streaming sites like Netflix or Amazon's own PRIME subscription service, meaning that it shouldn't be written off based on this alone. In fact, a lot of the cult horror movies are on the this front page lower down with archaic titles like CREEPSHOW and the original THING movie among them, appealing to this smaller audience does of course mean managing your marketing and your budget much more cleverly but it can lead to a better yield thanks to not having to make as much money back like the original Paranormal Activity,
Finally, although touched upon earlier, there has been a move away from physical ownership for quite a long time and as such, streaming sites are where marketing efforts should be placed. Netflix and Amazon's original series bring in a huge viewership thanks to their reputation and by being available in the ecosystem that created them; to be funded and produced by a site like this all but guarantees an audience as it is in their vested interest to see a return on what they are sharing and with Amazon's new fire TV set up, there has never been a better time to be a digital only distributor. Going this way also emits almost all production costs as packaging, disks, transportation and stock crumble away to server space and bandwidth, both of which can be bought and hosted by the streaming site in question.