Understanding Reports and Earnings

Every filmmaker looks forward to the day their earnings arrive. But, understanding what is happening behind the scenes to get to that point is essential to being able to track your title’s distribution and monetization.

Overview

The process of getting paid by an exhibitor typically follows these three steps:

Tracking: Exhibitors monitor your content’s performance
Reporting: Exhibitors report a preliminary estimate of your earnings
Payment: Exhibitors finalize their accounting and send payment for your earnings

Tracking

Every exhibitor tracks viewership in some way, as the baseline for reporting and paying out earnings. But, each channel is extremely different based on their licenses and technology stack.

Watch Metrics

There are no standard watch metrics. Every channel will track and report on it’s own metrics with differing levels of detail.

Some common metrics:

Views: How many times does someone load and view your content.
Minutes Streamed: How many total minutes is your title watched.
Rentals/Purchases: For transactional (TVOD) channels.
Ad Impressions: For ad-supported (AVOD or FAST) channels, how many ads are viewed while watching your content.
CPM: How much you earn for each 1000 ad impressions.

Watch Periods

A watch period is a division of time exhibitors to divide the year into payment cycles. They will track, report, and then pay based on that watch period.

Common Watch Periods:

Monthly
Quarterly
Semi-annually (6 months)

For example, a channel with a quarterly watch period will track your title from January 1 to March 31, then report your performance for that period, and finally pay you your Q1 earnings. They’ll follow the same process every month.

Reporting

After the watch period ends, channels calculate an estimate of how much your title earned. (You can read more about how you earn money from each license type here.) These estimates are called reports. They include data only, and no money changes hands in this phase.

The vast majority of channels report financial estimates only, with no other viewership data. However, as channels update their tracking technology, it is becoming more common for them to report some additional viewership data.

Reporting timing

Every channel has it’s own reporting schedule. We share estimated reporting schedules in the Schedule tab of your dashboard. While some channels report daily or weekly, it’s not uncommon for channels to have 60 or 90-day reporting periods.

Paying out Earnings

After the reporting period, there are a number of steps channels take before they send earnings payments.

Collect funds from their advertisers
Reconcile and normalize their accounting
Conduct audits
Send Earnings payments

As soon as Fimlhub receives your earnings from a channel, we make them available for you to transfer with no holdback periods.

Reports and Earnings May Differ

It is not uncommon for reports and earnings to differ. Reports are estimates. Earnings are final calculations. There are two primary reasons why:

Short Term tracking vs Long Term Tracking
Financial Adjustments

Short Term tracking vs. Long Term Tracking

Channels often have two simultaneous tracking systems: One built for speed and the other built for accuracy. Here’s an example:

On AVOD channels, each ad impression can pay at a different rate. They use the term CPM (cost per mille), to refer to the price per thousand ad impressions. The channel needs to report an estimate of how much your film earned. Their short term tracking can give them an immediate average CPM which can easily be used to calculate the estimate.

But, in reality each ad impression had it’s own pay rate. They use a different set of technology to track real rates instead of the average, but it is not available in real-time. Their long term tracking system is more accurate, but takes longer to process.

In this example, the final earnings may differ from the reports because of tracking methodology.

Financial Adjustments

Imagine a scenario where a viewer rents your film for $5 on TVOD and then later has their credit card charge refunded. While the $5 rental may have appeared on your initial reports, that $5 will not be included in your earnings pay outs.

Or, say someone engineered a bot army to stream content, but it was detected by the channel as fraud. Those earnings would be overturned.

All kinds of things can change between the timing of reports and earnings pay outs that effect your final earnings number. Some common financial adjustments: