Amazon sold close to $40bn of advertising last year - bigger than Prime, bigger than the entire global newspaper industry and probably more profitable than AWS. But is this really advertising, rent, or something else? And what does that mean for Google?
Read MoreAmazon’s ad business is bigger than YouTube and more profitable than AWS. Shein is the biggest fast-fashion retailer in the US, with no stores. US pay TV subscribers have fallen by a third. Where do ad budgets go, where does rent go, and how many brands will there be?
Read MoreAmazon has scaled indefinitely by treating every product as an interchangeable packet, and by not caring what they are, only what they weigh. At a fundamental level, it doesn’t know what it sells. What would happen if it could change that?
Read MoreRetailers have sold private label products for a century or more. Is something different when Amazon does it?
Read MorePeople talk a lot about AWS as Amazon’s cash cow, but the ad business buried in the back of the accounts might be just as profitable.
Read MoreThe bigger Amazon gets, the more it’s worth reading the accounts. Does AWS subsidise the whole thing? Is the revenue $250bn - or $450bn? And is that ad business just a footnote, or is it bringing in more cash than AWS?
Read MoreBoth the UK and (today) the USA have given official statistics on how ecommerce and retail have changed during lockdown. The headline numbers are pretty dramatic. The UK went from 20% ecommerce penetration to over 30% in two months, and the USA from 17% to 22%.
Read MoreAmazon is a big company, but what does that mean? How big is ‘big’? What does ‘dominant’ or ‘scale’ or ‘huge’ mean when US retail is $6 trillion every year?
Read MoreAmazon is so new, and so dramatic in its speed and scale and aggression, that we can easily forget how many of the things it’s doing are actually very old.
Read MoreAmazon’s Alexa has been a huge, impressive and unexpected achievement. Amazon created a category from scratch and left both the AI leader Google and the device leader Apple scrambling in its wake. It’s now sold 100m units. So far, though, this success is pretty contingent - we do still have to ask what Amazon actually gains from this. What do consumers do with these devices that helps Amazon? What fundamental strategic benefit does it get? Amazon has put an end-point into tens of millions of homes - what does it do with it?
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