Washington Post:
Amazon today announced that Prime members can now enjoy six months of free unlimited access to The Washington Post National Digital Edition, a subscription usually retailing for $9.99 per month. After the first six months of access to world-class national and international news, Prime members can continue to enjoy unlimited digital access with a discounted monthly subscription rate of only $3.99, a savings of 60% per month.
What I find most interesting about this is the parallel with Apple. Just as Apple continues to add elements to its ecosystem to add value to all the other ecosystem elements, so goes Amazon, using the Washington Post to add value to Amazon Prime. If you value the free (and then discounted) digital access to the Washington Post, you’ll be more likely to re-up your Amazon Prime membership.
I’m not sure anyone is joining, or renewing, Amazon Prime for the Washington Post. Yeah, it may be a little bit of a sweetener to the deal, but if people cared about newspaper content they wouldn’t be in the state they’re in. This could very well be a sweetheart-deal from Bezos to himself (remember HE owns the Post, not Amazon). Theoretically, he could license the WAPO content to Amazon for whatever amount he wanted thereby paying himself out of Amazon funds. In reality there are limits to how far he can go, and certainly this will attract some scrutiny by, at least, the IRS, but as long has he keeps it realistic, this is just moving money from one of his pockets to another.
Since it’s only for six months, it’s just a new subscriber promotion. If it were permanent I would definitely regard it as adding value to my Amazon Prime membership.
crappy conservative paper designed to prop up the agenda of rich white guys. I’ll pass. (the WP pushes for encryption backdoors for government and is generally pretty anti Apple)
Yeah, Dave, it was Apple who first came up with the idea of “adding elements to its ecosystem to add value to all the other ecosystem elements.” No one had ever thought of that before.
Too expensive at $4 a month after a demo.
(I care about the Post only to consider commenting on Volokh, and I can do that by stopping page load before it redirects to the login.
No newspaper is worth money.
Period.)
Did he even suggest Apple invented the idea, rather than having it as a core business practice?
(In contrast to many of its competitors; Microsoft at least tries, just not very well, but Samsung and the other phone makers?
They don’t even try.
Google is the only other comparable ecosystem, and it’s a pale comparison.)
Maybe not, but the “so goes Amazon” remark suggests Amazon is only doing it because Apple is, and wouldn’t be doing it otherwise.