By Stephen Windwalker
We won’t jump the gun on what we find on the Amazon website (at least in this case) until an announcement is made, but it is too pretty a picture not to share a screen shot from a page that is, after all, now available to any of Amazon’s 114 million customers.
Back on March 15, in a post entitled What’s in Store for the Kindle in 2010 and Beyond?, I shared a numbers of ideas for new Kindle initiatives, including this one:
- Re-integration of Kindle content with Amazon Associates: Originally, beginning with the Kindle launch in November 2007, Amazon paid a 10 percent commission on links to all Kindle hardware, branded accessories, and content. This was much higher than the usual Amazon Associates commission of 4 to 8.5 percent, but early in 2009 Amazon zeroed out Kindle content commissions, presumably due to thin or negative Kindle book margins. Now, with intensifying competition with other ebook content providers and Kindle content margins rising to at least 30 per cent given changes in Amazon’s relationships with publishers, it would make good business sense for Amazon to re-establish Amazon Associates commissions for all content in the Kindle Store to drive more traffic there.
A few weeks earlier, I had emailed the same concept to an Amazon contact:
Now, as Amazon is positioned for better gross margins on Kindle content and also faces increasing content competition, it seems that the Amazon Associates program could again be very helpful in positioning Kindle content to maintain as much as possible of its current market share strength. Obviously this would be very much in my own self interest, but I wouldn’t waste my breath proposing it unless I thought there were good solid business reasons for Amazon to consider it.
Who knows whether this is just an early-morning mirage or something real that will merit a formal announcement in the next day or two? And if they knew, could they tell you?
If it is real, there are two very interesting things going on here:
- Millions of Amazon Associates websites all over the world will soon be promoting their favorite books in the Kindle Store, unleashing an unparalleled marketing force for the Kindle Revolution, with which Amazon’s competitors have no comparable arrow, as yet, in their quivers. While many assume that Amazon Associates websites are limited to a few scruffy blogs here and there, they actually include many of your favorite authors, NPR and your local public radio state, your favorite online news sources, and many of the largest institutional and commercial online forces in the world.
- There’s something else here that may be a slight atmospheric confirmation of our recent post to the effect that sales of the Kindle unit itself are doing just fine, despite all the predictions and reports of doom and gloom now that Steve Jobs has thrown his glove onto the field. While the screen shot and web page suggests that Amazon may be about to begin paying commissions of 4% to 8.5% for Kindle content, it also appears the commission being paid for Kindle hardware and certain Kindle accessories is actually being decreased from the very generous 10% that has been offered for the past 2 1/2 years to the standard 4% to 8.5%. It seems unlikely that Amazon would back off on its investment in Kindle hardware marketing if the hardware sales were flagging.
All this being said, I can be the kind of guy who, if you pour me half a glass of Sam Adams, I want a pitcher. While I would think it wonderful for Amazon to make all this a reality, it’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to all the ways in which Amazon could involve its most passionate evangelists — that’s you and me, brothers and sisters, as Kindle owners and Kindle content readers — in spreading the word. We do it already, but in the new Kindle 2.5 upgrade’s addition of Facebook and Twitter features, Amazon is taking a step toward making it more systemic. Where to go next? How about implementing the following ideas which we laid out two years ago in the first, #1 Kindle Store bestseller for 2008
The Golden Age of Kindle 2.0 and Beyond — Part 2
Kindle Owners as Kindle Sellers
And this smart column by Mary Schmich today’s Chicago Tribune is just one more indication that this is an idea whose time is here.
Kindle Content Affiliate Program
Likelihood of Adoption (on a scale of 1 to 10): 9. This one synchronizes chapter and verse with Amazon’s signature marketing and customer experience strategies. It would also easy for Amazon to protect Kindle owners from spamming abuses of the feature by requiring that such messages originate from a Kindle and allowing Kindle owners to block particular senders.
I’m just saying.