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Speaking Thursday during a conference call with investors following Amazon's second-quarter earnings report, CEO Andy Jassy boasted that the roughly one million users in the Alexa early preview program "really like the experience" and "recognize how much better it is than what it was before." (My own Alexa experience was a bit more nuanced.)
Asked about the possibility of Amazon "tapping into…advertising" with Alexa , Jassy noted that Alexa offers a "delightful shopping experience" and that "there will be opportunities as people are engaging [in] more multiturn conversations to have advertising play a role to help people find discovery and also as a lever to drive revenue."
Then Jassy went a little further, adding that "over time…as we keep adding functionality that there could be some sort of subscription element beyond what there is today."
So, what's Jassy saying here? Is there a possibility that in the future, Alexa might give a "sponsored" answer to a question, similar to the sponsored results you see at the top of search results?
And that leads to another possibility in terms of a "subscription element beyond what there is today." Might there eventually be an ad-free tier for Alexa , and if so, would that put Prime subscribers in the position of having to pay more for an Alexa free from ads, similar to what's going on now with Prime Video? (It was TechCrunch that raised the specter of an ad-free Alexa tier.)
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