Impervious To Bitching

Yes, please!

 

I love Amazon.

“(They’re) expected to spend $4.5 BILLION on television and film content for Prime Video this year, roughly twice what HBO will spend. And so far, streaming video isn’t winner-take-all. Almost two-thirds of subscribers to Prime also subscribe to Netflix.”

That’s from The Economist and it shows, once again, how committed Amazon is to its customers.

HBO began raising the bar a couple of decades ago with The Sopranos. Then Netflix got into the content creation game with House of Cards.

Did we really think Jeff Bezos wouldn’t spend what he needed to spend to become our #1 choice for video content?

Especially since consolidation, Radio companies have sacrificed listener experience due to staggering debt and appeasing short-term shareholder demands.

This hyper-focus on maximizing profitability and stock performance for the next quarter, rather than staying focused on the long term health of the business, on making Radio more valuable each year, has hurt all of us who still work here.

Since the beginning, Amazon has taken exactly the opposite approach. No matter how much its public shareholders bitched about all the money it was spending, no matter how often idiot armchair pundits opined that it “could never make money” and “would go bankrupt,” no matter how much the stock got clobbered over the short and intermediate term, Amazon focused on the horizon.”

And now, 14 years later, Amazon is the only one of the early Internet leaders that is still thriving.”

Amazon’s approach should be a lesson to all companies, not just Internet companies. It takes a long time to build sustainable long-term value. It takes a big long-term vision and obsessive focus on the few things that really matter (in Amazon’s case, customer satisfaction). It takes a thick skin and the willingness to ignore the screaming and disgust of shareholders looking for a quick score…”

As Warren Buffett has often observed, it is the market’s insistence on ever-improving “quarterly results” that leads many management teams to make decisions that help profits (and stock option value) in the short-term and hurt companies in the long-term.  Sometimes these myopic decisions just result in companies under-investing in promising long-term opportunities. Sometimes they lead to corner-cutting and brand damage. And sometimes they lead to fraud.”

“Amazon has never done that. And that’s the primary reason the company is so dominant today. And it’s the reason Amazon shareholders who bought the stock on the IPO and held onto it have now earned 140X their money.”

Remind me: How’s that iHeart and Cumulus stock doing??

 

*Business Insider

 

 

Save