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00:00This video is sponsored by Morning Brew. It's a free daily newsletter delivered Monday through Sunday that I'm proud to say has been a part of my morning routine for months now.
00:08See, I used to watch random videos on YouTube while I ate my bowl of cereal, but now I'm keeping up to date on business, finance, and tech.
00:15Oh, specifically, I've been keeping up with all of the craziness in the housing markets.
00:19Like, last week, I came across this stat saying you pretty much can't buy a new home in the U.S. for less than $200,000 anymore, when that price range actually made up the majority of the sales in 2002.
00:30I spent a fair amount of time checking out that graph as well, and that's the thing. It's not like the boring, traditional news that I actively try to avoid.
00:36It's much more useful and, I think, upbeat and entertaining, so if any of that sounds like your kind of thing, I recommend subscribing to Morning Brew.
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00:57Amazon has been an insanely successful company. Let me know if you think otherwise, but I would probably identify them as the biggest success story over the past 20 years or so.
01:06Their sales have grown into the hundreds of billions of dollars, meaning they've been slowly creeping their way up to the top of the Fortune 500 list.
01:15The part that stands out to me here is the consistency, to be on that list for so long without ever dropping in rank.
01:21So, whether you like it or not, Amazon is one of the biggest companies out there, and there's a bit of a mystery to that, isn't there?
01:27What I mean is that they started as a small operation in the 1990s, selling books online, and have somehow evolved that into this massive company, seemingly involved in everything.
01:37We all know that Amazon is pretty big at this point, but my guess is that they are even bigger than many of you realize,
01:43and I say that because they have a pattern of acquiring these large businesses, but maintaining their previous identities.
01:49Resulting in all of these companies that Amazon owns contributing to those revenue figures, but on the surface, it may not be apparent to the public.
01:58So, I think that a good way to connect the dots of their evolution, while at the same time expressing their size and reach, is to go through some of their bigger acquisitions.
02:07But first, it's important to know that since the very beginning, Amazon has taken pride in their long-term, customer-oriented approach.
02:14In the early days, their main competitors were traditional bookstores, so to separate themselves, they did their best to utilize all the potential advantages of being an online store.
02:24Without getting into too many details about it, overall, they were able to offer a better selection with lower prices that was more convenient.
02:31When they went on the stock market in 1997, they invested most of that money into their distribution centers to improve their shipping efficiency.
02:38They felt that as long as the customer was getting the best possible experience, they would keep coming back to the site, and even tell other people about it.
02:47Their prices were so low, and they were spending so much to run the business, that they weren't making any money.
02:52That is the long-term part of it. Amazon had lost billions of dollars over the course of nine years before they reported their first profit.
02:59So, as I go through these acquisitions, keep in mind that Amazon has always been more concerned with the long-term potential, and how it would affect potential customers.
03:08First off, in 1998, Amazon bought Book Pages and Telebook. These are two separate companies, but they were actually bought on the same day.
03:16And this is the only one on my list that you've probably never heard of, but I do think they are significant in telling the story here,
03:21because they were Amazon's first ever acquisitions, and they were both online bookstores.
03:26It shows how they started on a more typical path.
03:29They were concerned with expanding their online book sales by purchasing the largest companies to do that in the UK and in Germany.
03:35It gave them more customers in those areas, and it helped them offer more European titles on their existing site.
03:41The next one on my list was actually bought on the same day as the other two, IMDB.
03:47Anyone who has any interest in movies whatsoever has probably been there hundreds of times.
03:52There is a lot going on with it now. They actually call it the number one movie website in the world,
03:56but it was started in England by this guy named Cole Needham as really more of a project for fun.
04:01He was a big movie fan, so he and a team of volunteers got together to create this database of movies and people who worked on movies.
04:09I realize that. From our perspective, it doesn't seem like the most revolutionary idea, but there was nothing like it at the time.
04:14Then, on that day, in 1998, he sold it to Amazon, but continued to run things as their CEO.
04:21And as far as I can tell in the timeline, this was Amazon's first major push into something outside of books.
04:27They were looking to get involved in other media, like video, and IMDB was the perfect way to get started.
04:33They were seen as a good fit because they had also prided themselves as being very customer-centric,
04:38and it's believed that Amazon wanted their collection of information so that they can use it to generate accurate search results and recommendations,
04:44which was a big contributor in their early success.
04:47Today, not surprisingly, if you're looking at a movie on there,
04:50they'll give you that little button where you can watch it on their Prime Video service.
04:54Or, on the other end, if you're looking on Prime Video, you can commonly see that IMDB score.
04:59Also, for a layer of acquisition-ception, to force a clunky movie reference,
05:04in 2008, IMDB bought Box Office Mojo.
05:08That is a complimentary movie site that focuses more on box office figures.
05:11So, there you go.
05:12Two of the biggest movie-related websites, both owned by Amazon.
05:17The next one on my list is Audible, which leads me to today's sponsor...
05:21That's just a joke.
05:22But, in 2008, Amazon bought the popular audiobook provider for $300 million,
05:27which was actually 23% more than they were trading for.
05:30There were a few things motivating them to pay that premium.
05:33For one, this was part of Amazon's aggressive push toward digital books.
05:38And I have to say, for an online book retailer, I can't think of anything that makes more sense than digital books.
05:43They had introduced their popular Kindle not even a year earlier,
05:46and now audiobooks was the next big way to get involved.
05:49The other aspect was their competition with Apple.
05:52See, the year before, they had also launched Amazon MP3, which was like their equivalent to iTunes.
05:59Amazon had already sold CDs to complement their book sales, going back to very early on,
06:03and this was their way to make a digital store for their music, much like they were doing with their books.
06:08About a quarter of Audible's audiobooks were already sold using iTunes,
06:13so the services were competing in that way in addition to the music,
06:17and buying them was like a way to keep them away from Apple while strengthening their own downloads.
06:22So today, it's all integrated together.
06:24If you go to buy a book on Amazon, they will give you the option of the physical copy,
06:28the Kindle version, or the audiobook version through Audible.
06:31The next one I have on the list is the popular online shoe retailer, Zappos.
06:37In 2009, Amazon bought them in a deal that I believe was ultimately valued at over $900 million,
06:43making this their largest acquisition to that point.
06:46Again, looking at the timeline, this right here was Amazon's first major push outside of media,
06:51as we've seen, before they were all about books and music and video,
06:54and now they were interested in, apparently, shoes.
06:57I mean, they already had this whole e-commerce thing down, so it made sense to expand into other products,
07:02and they were actually already trying to get involved in shoes before this.
07:05About a year and a half earlier, they had started a completely separate website called Endless.com
07:10that sold mostly women's shoes and accessories.
07:13I don't believe it was all that successful,
07:15so I could see why they wanted to acquire an already established business like Zappos.
07:20And Zappos was already using that same long-term, customer-oriented approach.
07:24They offered things like low prices, free shipping, easy return, so Amazon saw this as being a good fit.
07:29Okay, the list just keeps getting bigger.
07:31The next one on it is Twitch.
07:33The popular video game streaming website was bought by Amazon in 2014 for $970 million.
07:41They'd only been around for about three years, and were growing really fast,
07:44already accounting for 40% of all livestream content on the internet.
07:48Twitch was out there looking for a larger company to help fund that growth,
07:51and it was looking like that company was actually going to be Google,
07:54but since they were the owners of YouTube, there may have been concerns of a monopoly,
07:57so that one never happened.
07:59Amazon bought them, because they had obviously been involved in media sales,
08:02and more specifically, even video games.
08:05A couple years earlier, they had established Amazon Game Studios,
08:08and earlier in that same year, they had bought the developer Double Helix Games.
08:12They even said that they bought Twitch to show how much they believed in the future of gaming,
08:16so many of you may be shocked to learn that Amazon is heavily involved in video games,
08:20in terms of developing, publishing, and even streaming.
08:23Next up is an even bigger acquisition.
08:26In 2017, they paid over $13 billion to buy Whole Foods.
08:31It's a chain of almost 500 grocery stores known for their fresh, organic foods,
08:35as well as their high prices.
08:37Now, this one may seem the most confusing, right?
08:39Here we have a company that helped revolutionize retail as we know it,
08:42by eliminating the need for physical stores,
08:45and then they bought a large chain of physical stores.
08:48Well, for one, it's good to have a physical presence,
08:50it's a way to sign people up for Amazon Prime memberships,
08:53but also, groceries, specifically fresh produce and things like that,
08:57are something that people tend to buy in person, rather than online.
09:01I'm thinking that this is similar to what happened with Zappos,
09:04where they were struggling to sell something,
09:06so they went out and acquired a company that would help them do it better.
09:09Not to mention the Amazon Fresh stores,
09:11they had started opening a few years later.
09:13They are a different thing, operated separately,
09:15but it's speculated that Whole Foods was kind of like their entryway into the industry,
09:19so that they could learn enough to start their own store.
09:22Maybe Walmart was even part of the motivation as well.
09:25They're the country's other biggest retailer that's been getting involved in online operations,
09:29so maybe Amazon is doing the opposite to keep up with them.
09:33It gets to be a lot of speculation from this point,
09:35so I'm going to move on to the next acquisition,
09:38which is Ring.
09:39In 2018, Amazon bought the Video Doorbell Company for $1 billion.
09:43They had been involved in artificial intelligence,
09:45going back to the early days of their website,
09:47trying to give the best book recommendations to their customers.
09:50From there, they utilized that technology to enter the smart home and surveillance market,
09:54with products like Amazon Echo, Amazon Key, Amazon Cloud Cam,
09:57and, of course, we all know Alexa.
09:59So, they bought Ring to be integrated into their smart home line of products,
10:03and I will just leave it at that.
10:04Going back to the list,
10:06in 2021, Amazon bought the classic film studio MGM.
10:10They paid over $8 billion for it,
10:13so they could obtain the rights to over 4,000 films and 17,000 hours of television.
10:18That is a massive library of content that they can now put on their streaming platform, Prime Video.
10:23Streaming just keeps getting more and more competitive,
10:25and this can be seen as their attempt to utilize the large size of their company
10:29to their advantage in keeping up with the others.
10:31I have to think that the hope is it'll make more people sign up for Amazon Prime
10:35and ultimately help them in other parts of the business as well.
10:38So, there you have it,
10:39a sizable list of well-known companies spanning across multiple industries,
10:43all owned by Amazon.
10:45I know that on the surface, all of this seems a little jumbled and unrelated,
10:49but I'm hoping that after learning about the circumstances behind them,
10:52that it starts to make a little more sense.
10:54They are all part of that long-term, customer-oriented approach,
10:58so even though the reason or the benefit may not be obvious at first,
11:01they are all pieces of a bigger strategy that's been slowly connecting
11:05into one of the largest companies on Earth.
11:08Let me know in the comments,
11:09was I right in guessing that Amazon is bigger than you realized?
11:12I should make it clear that there is a lot more that could be said about this list,
11:15and there's a lot of other things that I didn't even mention.
11:18Dozens of other acquisitions, their logistics network,
11:21there's simply too much to talk about here,
11:23so I recommend looking further into it if you want a more detailed picture.
11:26My intention for this video was to keep it at a higher level
11:29by highlighting some of the bigger pieces that are branded differently
11:32that I think give a good overview of them over the years.
11:35And finally, the obvious question,
11:37is Amazon getting too big?
11:39It's a common criticism.
11:40I mean, you can see how much they control here,
11:42so let me know what you think about that.
11:44And any other thoughts you have about Amazon,
11:46leave them in the comments.
11:47I'd like to hear what you have to say.
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