Amazon has Hollywood’s worst shows but its best business model
As bullets fly around a high-speed train carrying a former Miss World and a gang of spies through the Italian Alps, shopping is surely the last thing on viewers’ minds. Yet should they press pause, they will see an option to buy items from the show: the heroine’s gold necklace, her red dress, or the teetering stilettos in which she is improbably running rings around the villains. Only her exploding perfume is not yet for sale.
“Citadel”, a thriller on Amazon Prime Video, shows what happens when the world’s biggest online retailer becomes one of its biggest entertainment producers. As well as buying merchandise from the show on Amazon’s e-commerce site, audiences can listen to its soundtrack on Amazon Music, or read about its production on Amazon’s sister site, imdb.com. Its multinational cast and plot, and planned spin-offs in different languages, are chosen to appeal to shoppers around the world.
First, advertising. In little more than a decade Amazon has created a digital-ads business that has disrupted the duopoly of Google and Meta. Its ad revenue this year will be around $45bn, making up about 7.5% of worldwide digital advertising, estimates Insider Intelligence, a research company. It is already more than a third the size of Meta’s ad business. But whereas Google and Meta both have healthy video-ad operations (through YouTube and Reels, respectively), Amazon’s inventory is mainly sponsored search results on its e-commerce site.
2023-08-27 10:39:36
Post from www.economist.com
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