It just would've been tricky to make it a public takeover, because corporations don't know how to value a newspaper's future earnings. "The Grahams are probably the last people in the world who'll make money selling a newspaper," Mutter says. "He invented e-commerce, you don't think there's going to be e-commerce on every page of The Washington Post?" 1. Amazon is already in the content production and distribution business — and news is just another kind of content. 2. It's Amazon Publishing, which has put out hundreds of books under several imprints. It's easy to imagine that Prime subscribers and Kindle buyers will soon have convenient, free access to the Washington Post — and that this access might make a Prime subscription or Kindle ownership more valuable. 3. 4. But Amazon is also probably the most efficient physical delivery system the world has seen, and print advertisements still generate a lot of the Post's revenue.
– Jeff Bezos is a major Business Insider investor, so in the wake of the Washington Post buy, Henry Blodget has been fielding a lot of questions on what it's like to have the Amazon founder holding the purse strings. The answer? "It's great," Blodget writes. "Any company that cares about building great products and services and long-term value could not ask for a better backer." Unlike most financial investors, Blodget says Bezos is all about the long game, taking any chance to reinvest profits in exciting future possibilities. Bezos probably just thinks owning the Post will be cool, Blodget speculates. "This is a man who invests in rockets and atomic clocks, after all. He doesn't necessarily make these investments for the money. Or bragging rights. Or strategic synergies." Not that those don't exist: Amazon and the Post are both content creators, for starters, and Amazon is getting into the local physical deliveries business. Lydia DePillis at the Washington Post adds that the paper's brand will lend prestige to the fledgling Amazon Publishing, and that its webpage will be a high-traffic place to advertise Amazon's wares. "The Post doesn't need to generate revenue" anymore, DePillis writes. "It can complement and amplify other regions of Amazonia." Click here for Blodget's full column, or here for DePillis'.