Amazon Prime Members Now Get ‘Audible Channels’ as a Perk

Prime Video launching original programming in India

Amazon has been building out its Prime membership perks aggressively since it launched in February 2005. Ten years after, the Seattle-based online retail and technology company keeps adding perks to the $99 a year membership for Amazon Prime. The latest of these is Audible Channels, a paid subscription service that will now be free for Prime Members.

Some of the more recent additions have been Prime Now, a one-day-delivery service for Prime members, same-day package deliveries for several cities and new programming on Prime Video apart from a dozen or so other perks that Amazon Prime members have enjoyed for years.

Audible was bought by Amazon in 2008, and is a portal for free and paid audiobooks, podcasts, audio versions of news articles, etc. In July of this year Audible Channels was launched as one of the first audiobook subscription services, and is available for either a $4.95 a month fee for Audible Channels, or a $14.95 monthly subscription to the entire Audible library of recordings.

Amazon Prime members will now be able to access Audible Channels for free, and that includes mostly short audio format programming.

Although Amazon doesn’t reveal its Prime Membership count, estimates put their total user base at somewhere between 57 million and 61 million members in the United States alone.

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Globally, that figure goes up well beyond 80 million. Amazon Prime was recently launched in India, which is estimated to become Amazon’s second biggest market after the United States.

With no way to break the Alibaba moat in China, Amazon has to be satisfied with a fringe market share of less than 1.5%. In fact, Amazon actually sells on Alibaba’s platform TMall in China, as discovered by Chinese reporters last year. So this isn’t a promising market for Amazon – not while Alibaba holds the market in its vice-like grip and the company’s top executives regularly hob-nob with highly placed government officials.

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Though they may be small fry in the Chinese market, that’s not the case in any of the other 12 overseas markets that Amazon currently operates in. After discovering the sheer brand power of Amazon Prime, the company tried its first Prime Day mega-sale last year and it was a major hit. They did it again this year and saw some serious peak sales once again, so we’re pretty sure they’re going to grab it by the tail and not let go.

Amazon needs every penny it can make. Why? Because it uses a ton of cash to keep expanding in new markets all the time. That, coupled with their advertising and shipping costs, keeps them barely above the water in terms of being profitable as a company. But they’re not worried, and neither are the folks who have invested money into Amazon stocks.

The new Audible perk is just one of several new perks that the company intends to announce for its Prime members. In fact, these were the exact words of founder and CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, when they announced their earnings at the end of 2015:

“We want Prime to be such a good value, you’d be irresponsible not to be a member.”

With that kind of focus on customer value, a $100+ billion can move mountains. And that’s exactly what Amazon continues to do 17 years since its inception as a “website that sells books.”

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