Crunching data from a late-2016 SEC filing, Jackdaw Research Chief Analyst Jan Dawson concluded that Amazon Prime serves around 70 million subscribers and takes in annual revenue of around $2.5 billion from video streaming.
The numbers, while hardly confirmed by the online retail giant, shed light on a shadowing area of the SVOD business. While Amazon’s larger SVOD competitor, Netflix, makes its subscriber and revenue data abundantly clear every quarter, Amazon doesn’t break out its data for subscription video streaming.
The 10-K filing “doesn’t report Prime directly, but there’s enough data here to provide some really interesting insights into the Prime program, how many members it has, how much revenue it generates, and how revenue is split between shipping and other services,” Dawson said in a post on Medium.
So how did Dawson determine that Prime currently has 70 million subscribers? He relies on other outside data.
For example, Morgan Stanley recently speculated that about 90% of Amazon’s “retail subscription” revenue comes from Prime. (Other services, like audio books service Audible, take up the other 10%.)
Calculating that the average Prime subscriber pays around $88 a year for a subscription, Dawson divided that average into retail subscription revenue … and voila, came up with 70 million.
While Prime’s subscriber base is in the neighborhood of Netflix’s 93 million customers worldwide, the Amazon service is about more than just streaming video. The average of $9 a month customers spend on Prime goes to other things, like free shipping of eligible goods shipped on Amazon.
Extrapolating the numbers, Dawson’s speculated that streaming video generates only around $2.5 billion worth of annual revenue for Prime—about a third of what Netflix yields from SVOD.
“Netflix’s revenue from its streaming business is massively larger, not least because it allocates the full $8–10 per month it collects from its nearly 100 million subscribers to streaming, whereas even with 70 million subscribers, Amazon only allocates just under half to streaming,” the analyst said.