It is very popular for stock market observers to dump on Amazon. In fact, predictions of Amazon’s impending death have been made ever since Amazon became a public company. What else is new? Well, the funny thing is that, despite all the hate and criticism leveled against Amazon, in terms of the future of online publishing, Amazon is actually the best position among Google, Microsoft, Apple, and other players. Here are the reasons why.
Seamless Online Platform that Pairs Selection, Buyers, and Traffic
The great thing about Amazon is that it has all the raw ingredients for a seamless content consumption and product buying experience. It has all the moving parts that are need to create a system where somebody doesn’t have to leave Amazon for more information. The problem is on putting all these factors together.
Amazon gets a lot of traffic. Amazon has a lot of stuff to sell. Amazon has a lot of people looking to buy. Also, Amazon has a lot of areas where content can be produced or organically generated. Put all these together and you have a pretty much dynamic robust closed system that can generate money on its own. Other platforms like AOL and Yahoo can only dream of such publishing system.
Amazon’s Tight Traffic Integration Provides Continuous Value
Never underestimate the power of the software that is driving traffic through Amazon. This is not just a blind traffic generation or traffic direction system. Instead, there are a lot of signals being sent to people who visit Amazon so that all sorts of value are created and communicated. It is no surprise then that, with this continuous flow of traffic, the system as a whole increases in value as far as user experience is concerned. Amazon’s biggest challenge is to scale up its system and tightly integrate it with content components. This may sound crazy, but maybe the future of Amazon publishing would be to take over AOL. You have to remember that the market capitalization of AOL is a fraction of what Amazon is worth.