Amazon’s best television shows attracted over 5 million people worldwide to its Prime shopping club by start of 2017, according to the company releases and reveal for the very first time how the e-commerce retailer fares in the online streaming industry.
The documents also reveal that the American audience totals 26 million customers for all video programming on Prime, which includes movies and TV shows licensed by other companies. This is the first time that Amazon are releasing their audience figures and it covers the period of late 2014 and early 2017.
The released documents reveal the metrics of 19 shows exclusively streamed on Amazon. It includes their cost, their viewership and the number of people they help attract to Prime. These shows, known as Prime Originals account for about 25% of what analysts believe to be total Prime sign-ups.
Amazon’s business strategy in relation to the e-commerce and Amazon Prime is to convert the viewers into shoppers by including two-day package deliveries and other benefits for an annual fee. Chief Executive Jeff Bezos himself has been very vocal about the company’s use of videos to accelerate merchandise sales. In 2010, the world’s biggest retailer started Amazon Studios to create original content that have since grabbed awards and Hollywood buzz.
A quote that has gone viral by Bezos in 2016 stated, “When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes.”
Amazon Prime has also become one of Amazon’s biggest expenses with over $5 billion a year spent on original and licensed content. However, the company has never released the amount of subscribers it won with this strategy but everything leads to suggest that there is a financial logic behind their complex business strategy as they are increasing commercial projects and aiming more film awards.