“Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s annual shareholder letter, released on Wednesday evening, included an unexpected reveal. He shared how many Amazon Prime members Amazon now has: 100 million,” Daniel Roberts writes for Yahoo Finance. “So, 13 years after launching, Prime has 100 million paying members.”
“Netflix has 125 million paying subscribers,” Roberts writes. “Spotify has 71 million people paying for its premium service… Apple Music has 40 million paying subscribers in 115 countries… Hulu, which is jointly owned by Time Warner, 21st Century Fox, Comcast, and Disney, had 17 million paying subscribers across its Hulu Plus and new Hulu with Live TV services in the US.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’ve been Amazon Prime members for many years now. It’s an excellent value. Plus, beyond free shipping and the other perks, we need it now for The Grand Tour.
What we really want to see is an “Apple Prime,” as described by Goldman Sachs analysts Simona Jankowski and Drew Borst is an October 2016 note to clients. This “Apple Prime” subscription would include the Apple Music service, access to the iTunes library of TV shows and movies (some for free), Apple’s forthcoming original content, and exclusive sports programming.
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Further, we’d really like to see a way to pay for all of the Apple services we choose for one price. Give us a bunch of tick boxes and let us choose our combination of iCloud storage, Apple Music, iTunes Match, etc. and let us pay a single price for all of our choices. — MacDailyNews, October 17, 2016
Congrats Amazon
That is 10 billion $ annually on prime membership only! But they lose it on frequent purchases by prime members.
Yes, perhaps a loss leader, but a powerful opener to Amazon’s array of products and services.
Similar to ‘default’ apps on smartphones and tablets, with Prime Amazon is making itself the ‘default’ online store for a huge majority of subscribers. Well worth a maximum ‘loss’ of $99/yr. (a good percentage of subscriptions may be student or low-income which have lower fees for a few years)
100 million Prime subscribers is a cool milestone, and it’s great value for customers. I’m sure they’re all generating good sales for Amazon.
But it just reminds me how striking Apple’s 40 million Music subscribers are. They’re each paying *more* to Apple on an annual basis. And where a Prime subscription *costs* Amazon for each subscriber, a Music subscription is a high-margin offering.
Apple Music is a very low margin business. A MDN article this week stated that margins were 15% for Apple Music. Virtually all money collected by Apple Music goes to the record labels, with the artists getting a few pennies.
I guess for Apple 15% is a low-margin business. Better than Netflix (roughly break-even) or Prime (huge loss-leader).
Prime users like myself do not actually cost Amazon by using the site more frequently. By locking in higher volume they get greater economy of scale with the impact throughout from source to your doorstep.
Also, Amazon has many products only available to Prime members and they capture that business which would otherwise be lost.
Absolutely agree with MDN’s take–Apple needs a single fee covering Apple Music, MusicMatch, iCloud storage, and a streaming media subscription!
So, MDN is an Amazon Prime user, lol, explains alot. Amazon is the company that lobbied DOJ to sue Apple and the book publishers! They’re also the company that collects info on you like Facebook and Google.
further into the book, we will read that Amazon “likes” information about “us” as much as Facebook and Google. Shopping on Amazon is very convenient once the item has been received. Post receipt, the process becomes much less customer oriented. They do well to “get” the biz, but “keeping it,” not so much.