By accepting this offer, you agree that Amazon has the right to collect anonymized web traffic data. This helps us improve your customer experience and offer you more relevant product suggestions when you search on Amazon.com and other Amazon affiliated properties.
Edit:
More interestingly perhaps, this allows Amazon to bypass the tracking restrictions at the platform level (say enforced by Apple, and has harmed Facebook).
Dropping to the network infrastructure level may make attribution and tracking on Amazon Advertising best in class across not just Amazon.com, but other properties? I don't know enough about the space so just musing, but I can't help feel this is a major development that's a bit more than Prime members now get more free stuff.
Seeing as how all ISPs and mobile service providers already do all that and more, It really doesn't mean much to me if its AT&T or Amazon doing the tracking
AT&T is selling your phone calls and text messages to marketers, how to opt out
I work at AWS so I'm not neutral here, but how would this even work? Now that web and app traffic is encrypted, mobile providers can "see" what websites and app you access via your DNS lookups and destination IPs, and only some of the time, but that's about it. It doesn't get to the level of specific product purchases or much that you could put into a recommendation engine.
dns over https (DoH) prevents the carrier from inspecting DNS lookup.
IPv6 could also prevent the carrier from easily reporting what the destination is. By service provider cycling through IPs. There’s also iCloud private relay that blocks this as well.
Man all that data is over rated and worthless. Monitoring ppl 24x7 is like keeping tabs on your cat 24x7. Nothing that interesting is going on. That doesn't mean the data isn't over priced and over sold to schmucks. But that game has been going on for so long everyone playing the games knows how useless the data is.
For advertisers it isn't. Signals for purchasing that could be had for cheap are extremely valuable. Especially if they're reliable. If Amazon could get me a qualified lead for the half the price of Google Ads, that would be a game changer.
I love it. Just keep jamming more random stuff in there and periodically saying, “you know, we give you so many amazing benefits that we just have no choice but to raise the membership fee again!”
Or split it off like they did with music storage (and deleting all but 250 of my stored songs), then peppering me with requests to upgrade to prime music 24/7.
I use prime because I have enough need for the shipping aspects of it that it works out favorably. Prime video is a very nice bonus.
Beyond that, there is a lot of hassle to being connected to Amazon. All their e-readers and audible can't help but advertise incessantly. These are apps where I want to open to the same place maybe a hundred times in a row as I read or listen to a long book. Yet, every time, it opens to the store page and I have drill down through my library to find my current book. If I'm on to my next book and search for it while in the library section of the app, it will pull up results from the store as well.
I feel similarly. Even pre-pandemic, the fact that I could often order something through Amazon and get it before I would have gotten around to driving 5 miles to the store is absolutely worth the membership and Prime Video is a nice enough bonus.
Ads are a pain on Kindle though I could admittedly spend the money to make them at least partly go away. Music I don't really care about as I get Apple on another bundle.
Amazon employees had unrestricted access to all stored and live Ring video? Just one employee they mention used it to watch 50,000 videos of women in their homes… And they paid just $5.8mm to settle.
If privacy of users isn‘t forced on these companies, there will be a future where watching nude photos and videos of their customers will be a corporate benefit for Amazon executives.
The last 3 items I ordered were obviously dirty used items missing parts, thrown loose in boxes without the factory packaging, and no padding. Like you said, it seems they are selling things that were found in the garbage, or at thrift stores/garage sales as new items.
At this point I am willing to pay 2x for an item I can trust from anyone but Amazon.
If they can take over my monthly phone bill that’s a huge gap. Prime is what $150? What almost 10x cheaper than my phone bill. Of course, the odds that it will offer an equivalent feature set is probably minimal so there will be a switching cost.
Your phone bill is approaching $1500 annually? What are your parameters? Unless that’s unlimited data lines for a family with lots of added devices, that’s a ton of money.
the funny thing is that one of the reasons I keep my prime is because it's a flea market where I can find stuff that I have an extremely hard time finding locally or need to pay exorbitant shipping, for 5-7 days delivery, from others.
The best example is my iPhone charging cords. It was $5, and didn’t work. It was so cheap that rather than the dog and pony show of doin g a return, I ordered another one from another vendor that also didn’t work
I then ordered official apple one that worked
And the HDMI splitter I bought sings to me
And the baby toys, it’s almost comically bad grammar on the box, and the kids songs are Chinese accents
My $100 battery charger, takes half a day to charge
The problem with bundling is it becomes harder to justify the more stuff you do not use. Prime Video already caused this for those who just wanted shipping.
Amazon's appeal is that any one of its services would be a decent price for what you get for the whole bundle. I pay $10 for my Prime membership when to get the same 4k video streaming on Netflix it is $20. With that $10 I also get free shipping and all these other features that I don't care if I use or not because just the video and shipping is a deal. If the prime price was $30 it'd be totally different math, but it's not, it's a deal any way I cut it.
Yeah at this point I view Amazon Prime as a streaming service with an extremely odd set of perks.
It's also interesting the various bundles- I found out about the Grubhub+ one, which is normally $9.99 a month and is free with Prime. If you use one or two of the services bundles it ends up being an obvious money saver.
I expect you are in the minority in terms of rationale. For most people, the more you get in the bundle, the greater the incentive, the faster the flywheel spins for Amazon. This is why bundling is both so powerful as a strategy and is also often the target of anti-competitive complaints.
That opinion becomes the majority when they increase the cost as well. Similar services have emailed me over the years, saying that, since they're continuing to grow and provide more benefits, they have to raise the price as well.
It's one thing when it goes from the $7/month I paid for Prime way-back-when to the $15/month I pay now. But the average phone plans are more expensive than that, on their own. So, if Prime offers this for all members, and a large percent end up using it, they'll have to raise prices in order to remain profitable.
If this were truly the "Free Mobile Service" offered in the title, that'd be one thing. But that's not how business works.
The flip side is that this makes Prime much more sticky - if you want to cancel Prime you need to find a new mobile provider and port your number over.
There's no way they keep Prime at the same price while also adding mobile service, but I guess we'll have to wait and see. Or maybe they do and start raising Prime prices in a year or two, knowing that said sticky-ness will keep people on Prime even if it starts costing close to the amount you'd pay for individual mobile service anyway.
Amazon spokesperson was just quoted denying this. "We're always exploring adding more benefits for prime members but we do not have plans to add wireless at this time."
This is interesting. I hope it grows in scope cuz AT&T needs to go die already.
I dont know how big Telcos havent been gobbled up by larger groups yet. They are such a slow moving gigantic revenue generating juicy targets. Big tech (advertising/media/cloud) is not big enough to do the gobbling. But big retail Walmart/Amazon are most def large enough to take out AT&T. And hope they do so cause I prefer dealing with them than the telcos.
ATT/Verizon/T-Mobile are dumb pipes subject to lots of regulation. The only one with decent profit margin is Verizon, and they are already the most expensive.
ATT is loaded up with debt from stupid attempts to not just be a dumb pipe, and I do not see much upside from buying any of them. Any future cash flows are surely already priced in since they are all basically utilities, and I do not see where the efficiency/synergy gains would be for another business to merge with them.
Big tech would much rather commoditize the telcos and treat them as dumb pipes. You don't have to eat everyone upstream of you, as long as you capture most of the value and leave some bits to the commodity suppliers it's fine.
On the internet, most of the value (ads, shopping, socia etc.) is captured by tech cos. The pipes (despite the net neutrality reversal) continue to stay dumb pipes.
Telecom industry isn’t that attractive a target because they have high capital costs, actual competition, minimal moats, and are stuck on an endless upgrade treadmill 4g, 5g, …
AT&T is specifically a poor option because they are loaded up with so much debt.
I think you have your numbers wrong. Big tech is in some cases 10-20 times bigger than AT&T (market valuation). Big retail is just around double if you look at Walmart and everyone else much smaller (if you remove Amazon which I count as big tech).
I'm not quite sure it would be a benefit for the end users to have big tech also own the wireless networks.
Amazon is not going to go out and build towers. They are going to license capacity from one of the three remaining infrastructure-providing carriers left (probably AT&T).
Additionally, any mobile network service that Amazon sells will have lower priority than mobile network service bought directly from the cell tower owners:
Readit News
By accepting this offer, you agree that Amazon has the right to collect anonymized web traffic data. This helps us improve your customer experience and offer you more relevant product suggestions when you search on Amazon.com and other Amazon affiliated properties.
Edit:
More interestingly perhaps, this allows Amazon to bypass the tracking restrictions at the platform level (say enforced by Apple, and has harmed Facebook).
Dropping to the network infrastructure level may make attribution and tracking on Amazon Advertising best in class across not just Amazon.com, but other properties? I don't know enough about the space so just musing, but I can't help feel this is a major development that's a bit more than Prime members now get more free stuff.
AT&T is selling your phone calls and text messages to marketers, how to opt out
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24756042
IPv6 could also prevent the carrier from easily reporting what the destination is. By service provider cycling through IPs. There’s also iCloud private relay that blocks this as well.
Deleted Comment
Then thought about it for another second then agreed.
Then thought about it for longer and said "No way again".
Honestly, I'm stumped on this one haha, which is an interesting place to be, contemplating who's more evil.
I use prime because I have enough need for the shipping aspects of it that it works out favorably. Prime video is a very nice bonus.
Beyond that, there is a lot of hassle to being connected to Amazon. All their e-readers and audible can't help but advertise incessantly. These are apps where I want to open to the same place maybe a hundred times in a row as I read or listen to a long book. Yet, every time, it opens to the store page and I have drill down through my library to find my current book. If I'm on to my next book and search for it while in the library section of the app, it will pull up results from the store as well.
Ads are a pain on Kindle though I could admittedly spend the money to make them at least partly go away. Music I don't really care about as I get Apple on another bundle.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/05/...
Amazon employees had unrestricted access to all stored and live Ring video? Just one employee they mention used it to watch 50,000 videos of women in their homes… And they paid just $5.8mm to settle.
I probably would use Amazon cell phone service, but would be good if I could just buy that, not all of prime
The last 3 items I ordered were obviously dirty used items missing parts, thrown loose in boxes without the factory packaging, and no padding. Like you said, it seems they are selling things that were found in the garbage, or at thrift stores/garage sales as new items.
At this point I am willing to pay 2x for an item I can trust from anyone but Amazon.
Deleted Comment
the funny thing is that one of the reasons I keep my prime is because it's a flea market where I can find stuff that I have an extremely hard time finding locally or need to pay exorbitant shipping, for 5-7 days delivery, from others.
I then ordered official apple one that worked
And the HDMI splitter I bought sings to me
And the baby toys, it’s almost comically bad grammar on the box, and the kids songs are Chinese accents
My $100 battery charger, takes half a day to charge
It's also interesting the various bundles- I found out about the Grubhub+ one, which is normally $9.99 a month and is free with Prime. If you use one or two of the services bundles it ends up being an obvious money saver.
It's one thing when it goes from the $7/month I paid for Prime way-back-when to the $15/month I pay now. But the average phone plans are more expensive than that, on their own. So, if Prime offers this for all members, and a large percent end up using it, they'll have to raise prices in order to remain profitable.
If this were truly the "Free Mobile Service" offered in the title, that'd be one thing. But that's not how business works.
There's no way they keep Prime at the same price while also adding mobile service, but I guess we'll have to wait and see. Or maybe they do and start raising Prime prices in a year or two, knowing that said sticky-ness will keep people on Prime even if it starts costing close to the amount you'd pay for individual mobile service anyway.
Reported by CNBC at 9:40ET
I dont know how big Telcos havent been gobbled up by larger groups yet. They are such a slow moving gigantic revenue generating juicy targets. Big tech (advertising/media/cloud) is not big enough to do the gobbling. But big retail Walmart/Amazon are most def large enough to take out AT&T. And hope they do so cause I prefer dealing with them than the telcos.
ATT is loaded up with debt from stupid attempts to not just be a dumb pipe, and I do not see much upside from buying any of them. Any future cash flows are surely already priced in since they are all basically utilities, and I do not see where the efficiency/synergy gains would be for another business to merge with them.
On the internet, most of the value (ads, shopping, socia etc.) is captured by tech cos. The pipes (despite the net neutrality reversal) continue to stay dumb pipes.
AT&T is specifically a poor option because they are loaded up with so much debt.
I'm not quite sure it would be a benefit for the end users to have big tech also own the wireless networks.
AT&T will never go away.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/tn4733/qci_leve...
ATT and Verizon both failed, with ATT failing big (tens of billions wasted).