Amazon Approvals & UGC Content Governance Best Practices
Disclosure up front: I work at Playwire. We deal with this constantly on behalf of publishers, and I got tired of not being able to point anyone at a straight answer. Posting because I think the findings are useful regardless of who you work with.
In the last year, a lot of publishers lost Amazon demand or can't get approved, and very few really know why. The answer is often UGC, and many premium demand partners are moving in the same direction as Amazon.
What's being evaluated in terms of UGC, from what we see in practice:
Amazon runs a content governance and brand safety review before approving publishers. It covers moderation practice, review and approval process, takedown timelines, audit cadence, sensitive content handling, whether policies are documented, and automated screening.
It's a governance evaluation, not a content evaluation. Amazon isn't asking whether your content is good. It's asking whether you can demonstrate control over content you didn't write.
And UGC is a much wider net than people assume. Comments count. Usernames, avatars, reviews, uploads. If a stranger can put it on your page, it's a surface a demand partner treats as risk. The number of publishers who've never thought of their comment section this way is basically all of them.
One more thing: Amazon typically reviews each submission once. Getting a second look or an appeal is hard. Which makes getting your governance policy locked in before you submit super important.
Stakes, for calibration: across our network Amazon averages 20.5% of total site revenue where it runs, median 17.6%, and 2.35× more per site than any other bidder we measure.
Learn more here: https://www.playwire.com/blog/what-ugc-governance-documentation-amazon-expects-before-approving-you