Evans: Amazon Bundles Digital Content to Lock In Retail Shoppers
Benedict Evans · a16z Podcast | Everything You Need to Know About Amazon · Jan 2, 2019 · at 15:53
Tech analyst Benedict Evans explains the strategy behind Amazon Prime, where low-marginal-cost perks like streaming video are used to lock in e-commerce purchasing habit.
0:00 / 0:29exact quote · 30.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“So they throw that into your Prime subscription, they throw as many things as they possibly can that have no marginal cost other than bandwidth, which is not really the issue, into their, into your Prime subscription. As a way of enticing you into taking out a Prime subscription and keeping it in the first place. And then once you've got a Prime subscription, you say, well, I'm spending all this money on Prime, so I better make sure that everything I buy, I'll go and buy on Amazon, and I won't even look to see what the price is somewhere else. I'll just go and buy it on Amazon.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Benedict Evans
Evans: Zuckerberg's plan to resell excess AI capacity is flawed
“I saw a slightly strange quote from Mark Zuckerberg saying, well, if it turns out that we've over invested, we can just resell the capacity. And I thought, let me just like stop you there, Mark, because if it turns out that you can't use your capacity, everybo…”
Evans: OpenAI's huge user base is fragile without network effects
“You've got these eight or nine hundred million weekly active users, but you don't have, but that feels very fragile because all you've really got is the power of the default and the brand. You don't have a network effect. You don't really have feature lock-in.…”
Evans: PC innovation is being perfected because the PC era is over
“And you could kind of look at it the other way around, I think, that what's happening in the kind of the PC world is it's being perfected because it's kind of over.”
Evans: For Google, Android is a tactic; for Apple, device is strategy
“For Google, Android is a tactic, and cloud is a strategy, whereas for Apple, the device is a strategy, and the cloud is a tactic. The cloud is a feature of the core strategy, whereas for Google, the device is a feature of the core strategy.”
Evans: Facebook Has Not Created New User Behavior Since News Feed
“Well, they haven't actually created any new behavior since the newsfeed. What they'done is they bought Instagram, and they bought it very early at what at the time everyone said was a ludicrously high price. At the time, it was, actually, it was a very good pr…”