Blog
Business Economics: Amazon buys Twitch
27th August 2014
Here is some background on Amazon's all-cash purchase of live gaming site Twitch. Read through it and consider some of the likely business synergies from the acquisition.
Amazon is trying to grow an alternative to Google's ad words and the sheer scale of Twitch's platform (where predominantly young people watch others gaming) provides an ideal opportunity to embed their own Amazon Sponsored Links into the product.
Naturally any acquisition carries risks - can you find some of them in the article?
Amazon has made a number of acquisitions in the digital media space - it bought Netflix rival Lovefilm for nearly £200m in 2011 and audio book service Audible.com for $300m in 2008.
Industry analysts claim that Amazon is building a four pillar approach - scaling up business platforms in live gaming, books, video and music. Amazon has already started investing in human capital by employing games developers to design Amazon's own computer games.
Geoff Riley
Geoff Riley FRSA has been teaching Economics for over thirty years. He has over twenty years experience as Head of Economics at leading schools. He writes extensively and is a contributor and presenter on CPD conferences in the UK and overseas.