If you’ve been kept awake at night wondering what Amazon pays for data transfers over WhisperNet, a snippet from Mark Glaser’s MediaShift Blog on PBS will help -
Economics of delivering a newspaper on Kindle:
> Avg. file size = 1.2MB
> Bandwidth cost = 12 cents per MB
> Selling price = $13.99 month
> Monthly bandwidth cost = $4.32That eats into monthly cost of serving content into Kindle. So Amazon is probably losing money on some of the lower cost publications it sells. This cost doesn’t even include advertising in the mix.
That answers a lot of questions including why the recent 15 cents per MB charge was added for personal documents transferred over WhisperNet. It also kills the ‘Amazon is so greedy they want 70% of newspaper subscription prices’ argument that Mr. Murdoch and other soon-to-be extinct newspaper dinosaurs are propagating.
Filed under: news Tagged: | kindle costs, whispernet
