Update - We're #8! We're #8!

Not as catchy as We're #1, but there's no way that's gonna happen. If we break top 5 I will be ecstatic.

We're getting hit with some bad reviews now, but it's totally expected. I don't even take them personally--you gotta understand the mindset of the viewer. Look at those other movies up there...they all cost over a million dollars, many of them over 20 million...and then they decide to check out our little under $50K opus...

So it's no big deal to me.

Maybe you're wondering...what about your other movie, Bounty? Well, it's moving up too. It's broken into the top 100 horror movies(#87). I also did a cool little trick to entice the viewers.

You can add a background image that the peruser can see bits of behind the other icons. And then when they click off, it still shows for a split second. Like, this is how it looks normally:

You can only barely see the stuff in the background. But here's what it looks like in motion:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/MQj4vJD7sO4

I'm not violating any terms because I made sure I painted out the nips and the crotch, and then darkened the crotch so you can't tell I've made her into a mannequin.

Anyway, will be curious to see these reviews since I think Bounty's been more warmly received by the younger generation than the older ones. (I had an older in-law tell my father in-law after watching Bounty that next time he'd just write a check for a couple of tickets so he didn't have to come to my next movie--that's how bad he didn't like it. )

Makes me laugh.

One Million Minute Club

We hit it at the 19 day mark.

We also got banned in Japan. I'm a little worried it's going to impact our stats, not because of Japan, but because all of a sudden we've disappeared from Amazon's online lists. Like, if you search my name or "Garden of Hedon" you'll see the Blu Ray.

It will say there's two movies under Amazon Prime, but if you click there you'll only see Bounty.

I sent them an email asking what's the deal. Hopefully they'll straighten it out because now that we're top 10, I'm dreaming we can be top 5...

We're at 133 on the Popular list. If we break top 100 there that's pretty big.

#9 With A Bullet

We were at #14 for a day or two, and then I saw this:

We're up to #48 in mystery, #149 in popular movies and we're on page one of Amazon Prime Horror movies.

It's all a little overwhelming at the moment.

Am comparing it to Bounty now that we've let that out of the bag to see how they stack up. Bounty is beginning to rise--it's at #167 in Horror right now, and the numbers are rising.

Stuck at #19

Again, worse problems to have. We've made it up to 72 in mystery. #242 in popular.

The dashboard updates slowly, always a couple of days behind. But I am happy to tell you that we've passed the half a million minute mark. I'd like to join Chance's Million Minute Club, so fingers crossed...

Bounty's gone live and is moving up slowly. It's actually up to #265 in horror. I haven't checked the popular list--probably isn't on it yet.

Hopefully the spreading of the news will help it out.

Stuck at #21--there are worse problems to have...

Still at #21 on the Horror list, so I checked the mystery list which is actually even bigger than horror. Didn't expect much, but look at that! We're #86 out of over 1300 movies.

But, uh, look at the numbers today.

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Almost 450,000. And what I thought DOES appear to be true; the more popular your movie, the more popular your movie gets. How long that stays, who knows? Enjoying it for now.

BUT!

Big surprise here for you. I actually put ANOTHER of my movies on Amazon Prime at the same time as GOH and ran a sort of blind test to see the difference between a movie I pushed versus one I didn't.

So feel free to click here and add "Bounty" to your watch list.

Surprisingly Bounty hasn't gotten zero views. I'm not sure how people have found it, but it's at nearly 20,000 minutes viewed. Far off from GOH, but still not as low as I would have expected.

Now, it doesn't have the boobs on the poster like GOH, so I don't expect those numbers. But I think it's a pretty entertaining movie(he said humbly) and seems to be a favorite among a lot of my younger "fans". Younger being under 30. 

Man I'm old.

Anyway, more later!

Garden of Hedon Update - #21 and hopefully climbing...

Look at that--it seems only fitting that I'm now on the same screen with Chance Shirley's Hide and Creep, since he's the one that got me to commit to putting GOH up there.

We're now 305 on the Popular Movies List, out of about 9900 movies.

And more importantly...brace yourself...
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Can you see that? Over a quarter MILLION minutes streamed now. In only about 2 weeks time.

I'm pretty stoked about this.

Garden of Hedon: #22 on the Amazon Prime Horror Movie List!

Not gonna lie. Pretty excited. I wasn't sure we were going to break top 100, much less top 25.

We're #374 on the Popular list(now with 9,111 movies total), and on page 3 of Amazon's actual web site under horror movies. It's all data, data, data to feed into my spreadsheet...

It's early, but so far the experiment certainly seems to be a success. Big thanks to Chance Shirley for pointing out that the $.15 per hour could actually add up to something more than $5.

We're currently at 134,000 or so minutes.

Saturday Update

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The numbers are starting to really increase. We jumped up to #68 on the list, where we were #98 the previous day. We're also on page 10 of Amazon's horror list on their web site, up from page 20.

So, so far so good.

UPDATE

Here's why it's getting exciting:

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118,000 minutes

Stats Problem

You may wonder why I haven't posted anything today. Well, stats have frozen for the past two days on the dashboard.

I emailed Amazon who told me this:
We recently discovered a technical error that is delaying reporting on your Amazon Video Direct dashboard. We’re working on correcting the error, and it will not affect your payments. I apologize for the inconvenience this has caused.

 So, will be interesting when it comes back on. Because we've moved into the top 100(#92 to be exact) on Amazon Prime's movie list.

Top 50, here we come(hopefully).

But I talked to my buddy who said he's totally cool putting his name and movie here. So you can go check it out--he's Chance Shirley and the flick is Hide And Creep. It's easy to find, it's always in the top 20 movies on Amazon Prime horror now!

You can follow him on Twitter at this handle: @crewless

Go give him a view, and he'll probably keep us updated on his flick's progress! 

Thursday Stats

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Yeah, now we're getting somewhere.

When I first checked in the afternoon it said 19,000 or so. But you gotta see that it's not like we did 12K views in one day--a lot of this is through the revising of previous days. To see what I mean, here's the 19K chart and the 9K chart put together.

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As you can see, some of those numbers have been added to quite substantially.

Our ranking on the Xbox One Amazon app was at 310 yesterday at first check, now we're at 190. Promising. Just have to keep going up.

We were on Amazon's Horror movies at page 35 yesterday. Today we're at 21. So moving up there too.

I have tried something interesting to get people to check out the movie, and I'm not sure whether it's working or not. It involves this web page I put together in about five minutes:
http://kangaskahnfilms.com/goh-am.htm

If it seems like something that helped I'll throw what I did out here at some point. (no, it wasn't just me creating a ghetto page in notepad)

Google let me know that this web site mentioned Garden of Hedon:
http://amzprime.maft.uk/info/B01I2672SG/s

That might help our UK numbers. Not exactly sure if something like that exists for the US--I know there are Netflix lists like this, so it would make sense for someone to do it. Just not aware of it yet if it's a thing.

Wednesday Stats Get Interesting

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9000 Minutes

As you can see, the stats get put up at a weird rate, and as I said, aren't final for a couple of days.

A few things to note--technically these are yesterday's stats. Wait until you see today's actual stats. Something weird's going on--not sure what it is--but I like it.

And GOH doesn't seem to be moving up any list--it's still 310 AND 311. Yes, for some reason, it's showing up as a double on the list. It's not the only movie, so apparently there's some glitch in the system right now.

Also--remember when I put GOH up, there were 880 horror flicks on there? Now there's 904. That number's only going to increase. So more than ever, remember how important I said your one-sheet was in that web post way back? It's never been MORE important.

In case you never read it, here it is:
http://www.kangaskahnfilms.com/1sheet/

Next Day Stats

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6400 minutes

Well, as you can see, the numbers don't just go down--guess they got adjusted, but I like up much better than down.

We are hovering at the same place in the order list on Amazon. Not good. Really need it to move up. I know a couple of web sites have started mentioning that we're out there now, so hopefully word will continue to spread.

And no, we still haven't paid for the captioning it cost to get us up on Amazon yet. Fingers crossed...soon...

The Amazon Prime Experiment Continues

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4100 minutes

So here's the first couple of days after the movie went up. It's been interesting to watch its movement on the Amazon list, because it's pretty clear that if you can get your movie into the top 30 or so that you will be doing okay.

The highest we've gotten so far is 309. Granted, it jumped from 860 to that, so it's a nice jump but still nowhere near high enough.

As you can see you're allowed to do UK, Japan and Germany also.

They run a pretty good analytics, just don't count the number as rock solid until a few days have passed. For some reason I've seen the number go slightly down a couple of times, so maybe there are adjustments I'm not aware of.

The neat thing for me is this--I actually had another of my movies go live on Amazon Prime but I told nobody about it yet. I wanted to see the difference between a movie I pimped versus one I didn't.

Interesting enough, the movie nobody knows about still was viewed about 10 times. Not sure how they found it, but still...it's data to be considered.

More updates soon.

My internet friend, btw--his movie is now over a MILLION minutes watched. He's been in the top 20 movies for a week now, so it's clear that THAT'S where you wanna be.

Garden of Hedon On Amazon Prime

After going back and forth with Amazon for a while I got the captions file approved, and hit Publish after correcting all the information associated with the flick. Amazon said it would show up in their system within a couple of weeks.

Two days.

It appeared late last night as published, so I went ahead and looked, and yep, there it is.

Now, I don't anticipate a ton of money from Amazon on this. Like I mentioned, we get paid only fifteen cents per hour streamed, so basically about $.29 every time someone watches the whole movie. I'm not sure how fast-forwarding works, but I'm guessing they don't credit you for that.

But, I have an online-friend who put his movie up and has kept us abreast of his totals. Week one he'd made around $50. Not even enough to pay for the captions required to put it up on Amazon Prime.

Then some crazy shit happened. After a couple of weeks he hit half a MILLION minutes viewed. That's around $1200.

Sure, it's not quit-your-job money, but it's pretty good, especially for under a month. And the thing is, the more your movie gets streamed, the higher up the search results you are, which leads to MORE streaming.

The biggest hurdle is people finding your movie, because--at my current count--there are 884 horror movies on Amazon Prime. When my flick went live it was 861 out of 884.

It doesn't seem to be updating much but I'll check tomorrow since we started spreading the news today.

Thing is, though, this could be a game changer. Let's say you can make $7K-$12K a year streaming it through Amazon. You could conceivably bypass a distributor who's only going to give you--if you're lucky--a $10K advance on a back-end you'll never see.

You could actually host your worldwide premiere on Amazon Prime. When you submit the Publish thing you can set a date a few weeks in the future so it's not published right away. Then you pimp the hell out of the premiere date, make an event of it, and get a lot of people streaming it.

I imagine if it's the first place you could see the movie then you might be able to get some heat there.

My immediate worries are that Amazon will decide this is too expensive a venture for them. They're going to be paying out a lot of money that they weren't paying out before, all in the quest to compete with Netflix. They're going to have to worry about fraud--people involved in the movie streaming it over and over again just to make a few extra bucks.

What would be pretty great is if Netflix decided to try it themselves. Man, would distributors be shitting themselves if we filmmakers could do a complete end-around on them.

On the bad end, Amazon needs to fix their goddamn Xbox app. First off, their search engine won't show more than 1000 titles in the search. So when you start scrolling across the roughly 8000 movies they have online, it will stop at 1000 and go no further.

Also if you want to search for a title you click Y for search. Then it says "Click here to search". Bitch, I already clicked Y to search, why am I clicking another button?

Trying to binge watch a series is tougher than Netflix. When an episode's over you have to manually go to the next episode to play it. And if you finish a season, you have to go add the next season to your watchlist since they keep their seasons separate.

They've had enough time to steal the Netflix model, so let's get on that, huh?

I'll update this blog to let you know how it's going.

If you want to add it to your watchlist just go here and click on the button!
http://amzn.to/29Qm76v