The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, and Amazon: Together How High Can They Fly?

August 2, 2017

 While Washington Post reporters continue to protest that Amazon doesn’t own their newspaper—Jeff Bezos owns it!— the combination of Bezos, the Post, and Amazon is looking unstoppable.

Background from the New York Times:

As a private company since 2013, when the deep-pocketed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought it for $250 million, The Post doesn’t disclose much financial data. But by all visible measures, including the vital but hard-to-measure buzz factor, the resurrection of The Post, both editorially and financially, in less than four years has been little short of astonishing.

Last month, according to figures from comScore, The Post had 78.7 million unique users and 811 million digital page views, trailing only CNN and The New York Times among news organizations.

“The published numbers speculating about our subscription and ad revenue have so underestimated the reality that it’s comical,” The Post’s chief revenue officer, Jed Hartman, told me this week. “Our digital ad revenue is in the solid nine figures,” that is, in excess of $100 million. This year, he added, “we’ll have our third straight year of double-digit revenue growth.”

Craig Huber, a veteran media and newspaper analyst and founder of Huber Research Partners, said that while he had not seen The Post’s data, the gains reported are striking. “I’m very, very surprised by those numbers,” he said. “No one else is even coming close. If that’s correct, I’m very impressed.”
—
An investment perspective from the Motley Fool:

Amazon’s U.S. Prime Membership Doubled in 2 Years

80 Million Shoppers now subscribe to Prime

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) has been kind enough to offer a glimpse into Prime’s growth for the last few years. It said membership grew 53% in 2014, and another 51% in 2015. Even the more saturated United States grew membership 47% in 2015. Amazon neglected to give an update in 2016, but it did change its revenue reporting, giving us a closer glimpse of its numbers. I used those numbers to estimate that Amazon had around 70 million global Prime members on average throughout 2016.

Well, that number has only gotten bigger. Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) estimates Amazon has racked up 80 million members in the U.S. alone as of the end of the first quarter. That’s double the 40 million members CIRP estimated at the end of 2014. What’s more, growth accelerated quarter over quarter compared to the same period last year. While growth will eventually slow, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos seems to be doing a good job of delivering on his goal with Prime: “To make sure that if you are not a Prime member, you are being irresponsible.”
—
From Business Insider: Amazon Prime membership program now counts 80 million members in the US, up from 58 million at the end of Q1 2016, according to new estimates from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP). Prime’s growth has helped fuel the company’s rapid success in recent years, turning it into a dominant force in the US e-commerce sector with a 43% market share.
—
As Amazon Prime becomes dominant in digital marketing, the betting is it’ll take the Washington Post, also owned by Bezos, along for the ride. Here’s what Amazon Prime offers:

The Washington Post: Free for six months, then $3.99 a month

The New York Times: $19.99 a month

Wall Street Journal: $28.99 a month

USA Today: $11.99 a month

Bezos is combining his Washington Post, a news organization he’s making bigger and better, with the marketing power of his Amazon Prime: That leaves other newspapers—especially the New York Times—wondering how they can compete.
—
Bezos recently was called the world’s richest man, fighting it out with Microsoft’s Bill Gates for number one.

 

 

 

 

 

3 Comments • Filed Under: blog

Comments

  1. Richard Mattersdorff says
    August 3, 2017 at 1:17 am

    Good. I think.

    Reply
  2. Neta Ogami says
    August 3, 2017 at 11:15 am

    I switched from reading the Washington Post to reading the NYT 15 years ago. Now I only read The Guardian, The Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist.

    Washington Post who?

    Reply
  3. George Windsor says
    November 13, 2017 at 11:48 am

    I was searching for some information about Amazon stock today and came across this page: https://www.fool.com/quote/nasdaq/amazon/amzn I noticed that you linked to that page in your post here. Just wanted to give you a heads up that I created a post about Amazon Stock you might like, but more thorough and up to date: https://investormint.com/investing/amazon-stock Might be worth a mention on your page. Either way, keep up the awesome work! Cheers, ~George

    Reply

Speak Your Mind

*