Amazon Prime is a paid subscription service offered by Amazon. The service that was first announced in 2005, gives users the access to free two-day delivery (one-day in some places, streaming video/music and other benefits for a fee.
In its 13 years history, Amazon never disclosed the number of Prime members. But in his annual letter to shareholders, founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said that the membership program has topped 100 million paying members worldwide.
This is the first time Amazon has revealed a specific number for Prime. But Bezos here didn't say the exact numbers, and instead wrote that "Prime Video continues to drive Prime member adoption and retention." Amazon Music "continues to grow fast and now has tens of millions of paid customers," he said.
In the past, Amazon has only disclosed little information about the number of Prime subscribers.
Amazon Music Unlimited, the on-demand, ad-free offering,have expanded to more than 30 new countries in 2017, and the membership has more than doubled over the past six months, according to Bezos. Overall in 2017, Amazon shipped more than 5 billion items with Prime, than half of the items sold through Amazon coming from third-party sellers.
Bezos showed some advise in his letter, saying that having "high standards" is the key.
Besides the numbers, Bezos also bragged about Amazon’s marketing campaigns, including its Prime Day event in July 2017, saying it as the “biggest global shopping event ever” until it was then eclipsed by Cyber Monday, the day of online shopping deals following the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
"Prime Day 2017 was our biggest global shopping event ever (until surpassed by Cyber Monday), with more new Prime members joining Prime than any other day in our history," he said.
As for sales of some of Amazon’s other heavily promoted products and services, Bezos who has a net worth of $100 billion, remained vague.
From Bezos' shareholder letter:
One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature. We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’. I see that cycle of improvement happening at a faster rate than ever before. It may be because customers have such easy access to more information than ever before – in only a few seconds and with a couple taps on their phones, customers can read reviews, compare prices from multiple retailers, see whether something’s in stock, find out how fast it will ship or be available for pick-up, and more. These examples are from retail, but I sense that the same customer empowerment phenomenon is happening broadly across everything we do at Amazon and most other industries as well. You cannot rest on your laurels in this world. Customers won’t have it.
