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>3/ Cannibalize yourself. Steve Kessel was running Amazon’s media business in 2004 (books/music/DVD’s). Books alone generated more than 50% of Amazon’s cash flo
by achow 6y ago
>3/ Cannibalize yourself. Steve Kessel was running Amazon’s media business in 2004 (books/music/DVD’s). Books alone generated more than 50% of Amazon’s cash flow. Jeff fired Steve from his job and reassigned him to build Kindle. Steve’s new mission: destroy his old business.
- In 2015 Amazon's free cash flow was $529M [1], printed books contributed ~$250M to that
- In 2019 total ebook revenue in the United States $983.3M (overall and not only Amazon's). [2]
Was Kindle 'distraction' worth it? I love Kindle and eBooks but did Bezos really make the right call when Amazon was just about beginning to recover from the severe dotcom crash?
[1]https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/free-cash-flow https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/free-c...
[2]https://goodereader.com/blog/digital-publishing/ebook-revenue-fell-4-2-in-2019-and-generated-983-3-million https://goodereader.com/blog/digital-publishing/ebook-revenu...
- chillfox 6y agoIt’s better to cannibalize your own business than wait for someone else to do it.
- switch11 6y agoyes there is one other factor that people are missing there are over a million self published authors. They are all sending people to Amazon to buy books Those book pages have ads for other stuff The amount of money coming from that is not insignificant To give you some idea. I know at least 4 people who were making $50,000+ a month from affiliate sales Of course, most of them got screwed like all other affiliates However, 90% of the money was from stuff other than what they were sending people to Amazon for * 1 million authors, all desperate to get their books to readers, spending money on Facebook Ads and newspapers and radios sending readers to Amazon