Amazon Prime Membership Same as 4 Largest State Populations Combined

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Amazon Prime Membership Same as 4 Largest State Populations Combined

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Buried in Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) CEO Jeff Bezos’s annual shareholders letter, well after his descriptions of the company’s quality awards and the business principle, was the fact that the count of its Prime membership program has reached 100 million.

That is as large as the populations of America’s four largest states combined, among other measurements.

California has a population of 38 million, followed by Texas at 26 million, Florida at 20 million and New York at more than 19 million. The figure is also larger than America’s 14 largest cities as measured by population: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Washington, Miami, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Boston, Phoenix, San Francisco, Riverside and Detroit.

Prime is growing much faster than either these states or cities. The comparison to Prime will become more and more impressive as more states and cities are added to the lists.

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The Prime count is also about the same as the populations of the Philippines and Ethiopia, each of which is at around 102 million. They are the 12th and 13th most populated nations in the world. Down the list, Egypt’s population is 96 million, and Vietnam’s is 95 million. Germany’s is 82 million, and it is the largest country in Europe by that count. Prime has as many members as the populations of Spain and Canada combined.

What does Prime get Amazon, other than $99 a year (in the United States) from each member? Bezos wrote:

13 years post-launch, we have exceeded 100 million paid Prime members globally. In 2017 Amazon shipped more than five billion items with Prime worldwide, and more new members joined Prime than in any previous year – both worldwide and in the U.S. Members in the U.S. now receive unlimited free two-day shipping on over 100 million different items.

That revenue is larger than the gross domestic product of many states.

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
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.

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