How will Amazon enable developers to monetize Alexa?

Alexa today doesn’t allow developers to monetize directly from within a skill. But how might this change in the future? Possible options:

• Advertising — Amazon enables embedding ads into your skill. Works best for audio ads for current device form factors
• Paid skills — you buy to use a skill
• Subscription — you pay a recurring fee to use a set of skills
• In app purchases— you buy features or items within a skill to enable more functionality or to continue using the skill after a free trial period has expired
• Affiliate — when a user orders something from Amazon.com through Alexa because of a skill, the author of the skill gets a %. See Amazon Associates. An example would be if you were using a Bartending skill that was giving you instructions on how to make a Manhattan and you realized that you were missing an ingredient such as a vermouth. You ask Alexa to deliver a vermouth to you and this results in a % profit for the developer of the Bartending skill
• Pay per time spent by a user on your skill — Amazon pays the developer per minute per user’s interaction with your skill

All of the above are mostly familiar since they are existing paradigms in iOS and Google Play app stores. However, the last option, pay per time spent by a user on a skill, is new and seems the most intriguing . It sets up the right incentive model for both the developer and for Amazon. How?

1. The developer builds skills for Alexa that delivers something of long running value for the user. In other words, the user keeps using the skill and therefore is using Alexa because of the usefulness/entertainment value of the skill. Amazon wins since it increases customer engagement and customer happiness which leads to more attention and $ spent on Alexa/user
2. The developer wins since she or he gets rewarded for their efforts. In other words, they get $$

But is this model really new? A little digging shows us that it’s not. Amazon Underground is an existing monetization model where Amazon pays developers based on the amount of time an Android app is used. As an example, a developer is paid $0.0020 for every minute a user uses an app that is in the Amazon Underground program. It is only for specific apps and only for the Amazon Android Appstore. However, digging a bit deeper, we find that the legal agreement for Amazon Underground already has a section for Alexa skills. And it seems like it was added June 25th, 2015. That leads us to the question, why haven’t we seen this yet? Is this an unintended leak? Or an example of a plan that went wrong and therefore has been delayed? Let us know what you think