Amazon claims to have added three million Prime memberships in the run up to Christmas.
This being 2015, not all popular Christmas presents this year will have been physical. We suspect that digital subscriptions will have been rather popular.
One such service that certainly appears to have been popular is Amazon Prime, the online retailer’s core all-in-one subscription offering. Amazon has just announced that it added three million Amazon Prime subscriptions during the third week of December.
Of course, a number of these subscriptions will likely have been from last-minute panic-buyers wanting quick and cheap gift deliveries just before the big day itself.
More importantly, as GeekWire established, Amazon doesn’t distinguish between paid subscriptions and free trials here. There’s no way of telling how many of those three million will stick with it and actually make Amazon money.
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What’s more, Amazon still hasn’t revealed any details on how many Amazon Prime subscribers there actually are overall, beyond “tens of millions.” This makes it hard to put the new ‘three million new subscribers’ claim in context.
It’s even tricky to compare Amazon Prime’s Christmas 2015 performance to previous years. Last year, for example, Amazon claimed that it attracted ten million new members during the holiday season. That might be a higher number, but it’s also a much broader (and more vague) time period.
Next, check out our Amazon Kindle Voyage review video:
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
