Mentor Profit Sharing Details

(Before reading this guide, please read about becoming a Mentor.)

About these Agreement Details

This page includes the details for the video training instructor/mentor agreement for tutorials published on cmivfx.com from June, 2017 forward.

All training content at cmiVFX contains:

• Streaming access via the online streaming video player (Note: customers are not allowed to download the video content, but may use offline viewing features on the website once it becomes available).
• Access to necessary downloadable project files and resources.

There are two primary ways of getting paid as an instructor/mentor at cmiVFX:

• Profit-share percentage of direct sales.
• Profit-share percentage of monthly auto-renewed subscriptions.

Getting paid by direct sales

Direct purchasing is an option available to all customers. These customers prefer to buy the tutorial once and own access to it forever instead of paying month-by-month. They can either use the Buy Now button, or purchase many items at once using our checkout cart. Their purchase grants them access to a single user to view the content they've purchased online whenever they want. Unlike a subscription, which grants users access to all content on the site, direct sales grant access only to those products that the customer has chosen.

When a customer purchases using the direct purchasing method, they're taken through the PayPal Checkout payment flow. The checkout flow asks them for their payment details. Once they've completed the payment, a script is run automatically on the cmiVFX server that calculates the purchase price and divides each profit share portion to each payment receiver.

Profit share splits:

Percent to Project Manager	Percent to cmi	Percent to Mentor
20%	40%	40%

*Updated: For tutorials produced after July 21st, 2017.

Notes about splits

• In some unique situations, these percentages can be negotiated. Contact cmiVFX for more details.
• These percentages apply to the base cost. If the base cost of the tutorial is raised or lowered, or a discount is applied to it, (during a special promotion, for example) these percentages remain the same.

What does cmiVFX bring to the table?

cmiVFX delivers videos in high-end technical and creative categories and caters to a unique and select crowd. We provide a payment model that rewards you accurately as an instructor based on the value of your training in the marketplace.

Here are the other services we provide to Mentors. Together, these services allow you to focus on what you do best - teaching - while we focus on web technology, customer support, and marketing:

cmiVFX provides:

• A learning platform with progress tracking where students can browse, buy, view courses, and manage their progress in a way they're familiar with.
• Project management and assistance in project planning, vision, and development.
• Web service. We manage a large repository of videos and host them all in a secure place, managing the storage and backup technology, these are things you don't have to worry about. We keep the technology and streaming web player up to date, fast, and available on all devices, including mobile devices.
• Video encoding and processing. All you need to do is upload your video chapters to the link we provide and we take it from there, converting them to the best format for streaming on the web.
• Closed captioning. If subtitles are necessary for your course, we may choose to assist you in creating and reviewing them.
• Publishing and editing.
• Marketing and advertising. We do our part to spread the news of your course to existing and new customers via our newsletter, social media, and marketing campaigns.
• 7-days-a-week customer support and user account management (so that you don't have to worry about customer support regarding product purchase and delivery). We may pass on customer support requests to you regarding information about topics you cover in your training.
• We pay all PayPal Transfer and Payment Fees, all PayPal Chargeback Fees, and handle all Refunds.
• In some cases we may provide you with educational software licensing and log-in to be used for academic purposes regarding the creation of your tutorial.

About Marketing

We expect Mentors to split some of the marketing and advertising responsibility with cmi. Here are a few ways you can help market your material:

1. Post your intro/promo video on your blog and write an article about your training with links to the full tutorial on cmiVFX.
2. Where possible, submit articles about your work, with links and where to find your tutorial on cmiVFX to popular magazine publications.
3. Post to all of your social media channels and advertise your posts.
4. Tell your peers about your products on forums that allow you to post this type of news.
5. Word of mouth, tell your co-workers, friends, and peers about your work.

Example of a typical payment:

1. "Tutorial ABC" is listed for $60. Joe is a customer and clicks the PayPal Checkout button.
2. The button takes him through the PayPal Checkout flow where he completes the payment. The payment comes into the cmiVFX PayPal account.
3. Immediately upon authorization, a Mass Payout is created and pays out each person involved in the making of the tutorial: the Project Manager (when applicable), cmi, and the Mentor. In this case, cmi was also the project manager, and so the split was 40% to cmi and 60% to the Mentor. $60 * 60% = $36 is paid immediately to the Mentor. $24 is kept by cmiVFX, minus PayPal fees (cmi pays all fees).
4. Joe is taken back to the website where the new tutorial has been added to his account and is ready for viewing.

Getting paid by monthly subscriptions

When you're paid by subscription, the same profit-share is paid to you from monthly auto-renewals. Here's how it works:

1. Customers create a PayPal billing agreement with cmiVFX. Payments come in month-by-month on the new system and are recorded in the database.
2. Whenever one of these subscribed customers views your tutorial during that time, every second of viewing is recorded in the database.
3. At the end of the month, the total seconds viewed for the month are compared to the total income for the month from these auto-subscriptions, to arrive at a global price-per-second for the month. Every month will have a slightly different price-per-second depending on the volume of these monthly payments that were received through the website for the month. This number is reported to you on your Mentor Settings page at the end of the month after you've logged in.
4. The profit share agreement is then enforced upon the subscription sales, so in the case of a cmiPro content for example, where cmi is also the Project Manager, 40% of the price-per-second is paid to cmi and 60% of the price-per-second is paid to you, the Mentor.
5. This way, every Mentor is paid the value that each customer is receiving on the site each month for the time that their content was viewed.

What happens if my content is pirated?

There is no guarantee that your content won't be pirated. That said, we've found it to be effective is to take as many measures as possible to discourage customers from pirating and encouraging them to buy the tutorial using the following points:

• The purchased tutorial will be complete and high quality coming from the official source, whereas the pirated version may be missing parts or be of a lower quality.
• Maintaining website up-time and reliability, so that customers can always access their content whenever they want, without bandwidth or playback issues that could cause them to go elsewhere.
• We provide content at a reasonable rate so that it makes more sense to the customer to simply purchase the tutorial than to deal with shady and virus-ridden pirating services.
• We focus on customer service and quality in order to build brand loyalty and trust. Customers buy from us because they love our products and service and want to see more great content from us.
• Community policing. We rely on our community to remove pirated links on the web and report them where they find them. We've found that the community is willing to do this for us so long as we provide them with a great and affordable service. This has proven to be very effective.

In addition to the above, these are some of the steps we've taken to keep your content secure:

• All content transmission is encoded on a secure HTTPS server with CORS protection (Cross-Origin-Resource-Sharing), ensuring that it can only be viewed in-browser by a logged-in user who has purchased access.
• Content is delivered via secure video-on-demand streaming technology (this splits the content into little streaming packets so that it's difficult or impossible for browser download plugins the rip from the source).
• Content links are protected by using randomized and time-expired Amazon signed URLs.
• The cmi watermark is strategically placed on the video stream.

Exclusivity for Pro-Level Content

cmiPro Content, that is, content produced specifically for publishing for cmiVFX, is designed to be exclusive to our platform. Please don't publish this content anywhere else unless granted permission to do so. You may publish the promo video anywhere you like, and the first chapter for free, but please keep the full tutorial exclusive to cmiVFX.

Contact Us

Now that you've read about the Mentor Agreement, contact us to get started planning your new tutorial.