It’s a visual representation of Amazon’s acquisitions and investments from 1998 until its most recent purchase of Zappos for a reported $928 million.
The image shows the giant Internet retailer was extremely active in 1999 and 2001 and significantly scaled back investments and buy-outs after the dotcom bubble burst, but has been picking up the pace, particularly since last year.
Who will be next on the map?
wow . I had no idea they owned all that stuff… pretty neat
Mee to. Amazon acquire wisely and carefully i think.
acquire wisely and carefully
Well… Hindsight is 20/20. Amazing that most of these investments now exist only as a Wikipedia entry.
However for every PlanetAll.com, gearworks.com, nextcard.com acquired the drugstore.com homeruns more than makes up for it.
Yeh I wasnt too sure they owned all of that… you should do more graphs like this for the major companies.
Wow, they went nuts in 1999. Next up, LoveFilm.com apparently.
I bet any Londoner who sees this image will immediately think of the Tube map.
thats alot
He left out that Amazon itself is owned by the Sheinhardt Wig Company, which in turn is owned by The Ahp Chanagi Party Meats Corporation of Pyongyang.
I knew most of them, as part of Amazon family, would like to see similar illustration for eBay too
They invested in Animoto?
Definitely not own them.
Agreed. Hard to tell if companies listed are (a) Acquisition or (b) Investment. Graph treats both instances the same.
Well they own app. 1/3 of Lovefilm.com, so thats missing, but depends on the graph only shows fully owned companies or also investments.
Great company!
Well it says acquisitions and investments.
Very neat map by the way, and yes it does look like a tube map!
does anyone know how and where to approach amazon’s investment arm for a fresh startup/idea
you can drop a line or two in relation to the above enquiry: samad8007@gmail.com
many thanks
Wow, this is truely a “If you can’t beat them, Join them”
IMDB for $55M?! What a buy!
Didn’t know they owned Engine Yard, Alexa or IMDB.
Hey John, they invested in our Series B, as was widely reported at that time, but they do not own us.
Very cool chart. They own much of the universe.
will walmart eventually buy amazon or the other way around?
Chart slightly helpful in getting all (most) acquisitions on the same diagram (page). BUT it’s little more than a timeline, so I have no idea why it’s presented in this format. Moreover, it doesn’t give us that much new understanding. If I had time, I’d appreciate reorganizing it into a timeline, showing acquisitions by industry/market and showing the relative size of each acquisition in the market, which the acquisition competed in. Just saying.
I was on therocbox.com Was lunch on March 8 2009 . Was on for about a month and it un able to get back on . Anyone with INFO about this serach engine Karl thanks
Next on the map : FR Vente-Privée.com. But that’s expensive!
AmazonTube!
Netflix 2010.
You left off fabric.com which they aquired in 2008.
They acquired some great companies.
I knew they owned some companies, but didn’t know it was that many. Great visualization.
Yet another nail in the “Amazon is buying Netflix” coffin. NFLX market cap is currently 2.4B, down 10% from recent highs. Zappos looks to be AMZN’s biggest purchase to date and its value is less than 40% of NFLX at current market cap.
AMZN’s strategic growth doesn’t seem to involve going after really big companies, and although they got close with Zappos the Netflix acquisition would be much different.
1) AMZN still looks like it has yet to acquire a billion dollar corporation.
2) NFLX is a public company which means that there would be a premium paid over current valuation in order to convince current shareholders to surrender their shares. That premium would probably but the purchase closer to $3B if it was to happen. That would be more than THREE TIMES greater than any previous acquisition AMZN has ever attempted.
Amazon invested in AmieStreet.com in 2007
Wonder how they must be feeling about buying pets.com and kozmo.com in the late 90’s. At least they didn’t overspend.
A couple of billion in investments and I’ve only ever heard of three of those brands?
Though, not all good ideas are marketed well. So, even if you have never heard of some of these products, they are still pretty cool. And good investments on Amazon’s part.
Imagine Jeff Bezo’s personal Investments not listed here : D
It would be interesting to see this map for other large companies as well, then to correlate one companies investment / purchase strategy against others.
Any one being critical of Amazon buying companies that no longer exist. You need to realize that was the point of the buyout. Many companies buyout growing firms that could potentially become a key rival. I am sure at one point, many of these companies were viewed as quality start-ups that Amazon did not want to have to compete against, so they bought them.
Awesome! illustration.
Yeah Yongfook,
And no-one has mentioned that The Amazon is actually owned by beef farmers buggering-up the bush! (as we say down-under in Oz)
Anyone know what the actual usership of Amazon is compared to Apple? And respective valuations?
(Gee, I’m sick of reading about Apple when there are so few users on an international scale!)