Amazon
Amazon.com, Inc., doing business as Amazon, is an American multinational technology company engaged in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. Founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos in Bellevue, Washington, the company originally started as an online marketplace for books but gradually expanded its offerings to include a wide range of product categories, referred to as "The Everything Store". Today, Amazon is considered one of the Big Five American technology companies, the other four being Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft. Wikipedia
Website: www.aboutamazon.com
Symbol: NASDAQ:AMZN
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Latest news
- Aug 11: Further reading: A Gut Reaction to Amazon Canning Wondery (Nick Hilton) ... The Podcast Industry Reacts to Amazon Instituting Mass Layoffs at Wondery (Barrett Media) ... Wonder(y) no more: Amazon’s cuts point to the future of podcasting (Chris Stone)
- Aug 8: Steve Boom of Amazon doesn’t want us to think that the Wondery reorg is anything to worry about for the industry at large. “Podcasting at an industry level is doing incredibly well, and I think it’s doing really, really well here too,” he tells The Ankler in an interview today. He also suggests that narrative shows are “monetized better [when] supported by a premium revenue stream” - by which he means subscriptions - “rather than purely an ads revenue stream”. Boom also spoke with Variety, where he claimed an “acceleration of video podcasting is really what prompted this restructuring.”
- Aug 6: Amazon have asked us to clarify details about the new team looking after ads and monetisation for Wondery and Amazon Music, sending us the internal memo explaining it all. We said yesterday that the existing Wondery advertising unit would “merge with” Amazon Music’s advertising unit - but for clarification, these teams are both creating an entirely new business unit. By merging together, yes, but it’s a new business unit, reporting straight to Steve Boom, and we’re happy to make that clear.
- Aug 5: One of the biggest and most successful podcast producers, Wondery, is to be restructured by Amazon, laying off a reported 110 people including the company’s CEO, Jen Sargent. Wondery was bought by Amazon at the end of 2020 for $300mn, then doubled its staff. It currently has around 360 published shows.
- Aug 4: Riverside’s RSS feeds don’t set open CORS headers. Audio URLs use Cloudflare for an initial analytics redirect; but the audio itself is hosted on Amazon S3 via Amazon Cloudfront, like the vast majority of podcast hosts.
Data credits: Podnews newsletter, Wikipedia