Amazon Sells 3 Million Prime Subscriptions, Devices

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 13, 3:41PM EST · Published Dec 28, 9:25AM EST

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Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) has used it Prime multimedia and free shipping service for years to create a loyal customer base, as well as several devices to move it into consumer electronics. To show how well the efforts have done, its management claimed to have sold 3 million of these products and services during the third week of December:

Amazon’s 21^st holiday was a record-breaker for Amazon Prime, Amazon Original Series and Amazon devices. More than three million members worldwide joined Prime during the third week of December, bringing milestone growth to the membership program which offers unlimited Free Two-Day shipping, Free Same-Day Delivery, superfast free two-hour delivery via Prime Now in more than 20 metro areas, and unlimited access to tens of thousands of movies and TV episodes, including award-winning Amazon Original Series at no additional cost. Prime members made The Man in the High Castle the most watched TV season on Prime Video this holiday by 4.5x and doubled their total viewing hours of Prime Video titles, compared to 2014. This holiday was also the best ever for Amazon devices, doubling last year’s record-setting shopping season with millions of devices sold. Among Amazon devices, the all-new Fire tablet was the #1 best-selling, most gifted and most wished-for product across the millions of items available on Amazon.com since its introduction 15 weeks ago.

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Outsiders have been convinced that the costs of these new series are a loss leader, which allows the e-commerce company to compete with similar original content from Netflix Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX) and traditional media companies. Whether this strategy helps Amazon get and keep customers is impossible to tell. But Amazon management may believe that the company cannot be left behind in terms of what it offers loyal subscribers. Management did not disclose total numbers of Prime subscribers and device buyers.

Amazon has failed with new initiatives it has offered in the past. It killed its Fire Phone earlier this year. Sales were too tiny for it to compete with similar products, particularly from Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Samsung.

Do 3 million new customers mean anything for Amazon financially, or is the announcement just a useless press release?

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.