In keeping with Amazon.com Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) strategy of driving more traffic to its various offerings, the company said Tuesday morning that Amazon Prime’s U.S. customers will now be get unlimited photo storage on its Amazon Cloud Drive storage service. The new service, dubbed Prime Photos, is now included in a Prime customer’s $99 annual fee.
Prime customers already get free two-day shipping, unlimited access to Prime Instant Video and Prime Music, early access to selected Lightning Deals and access to more than 600,000 books that customers can borrow from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. Customer videos are not included in the offer, although Amazon points out that videos can be saved in the 5 GB of free storage Prime customers get when they sign up for the $99 service.
Adding unlimited photo storage gives Amazon Prime rough parity with the OneDrive unlimited storage offer to subscribers of Microsoft Corp.’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Office 365 and Flickr’s one TB of free storage. Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) offers 15 GB of free storage on its Google Drive cloud, while cloud-based storage service Dropbox offers 2 GB free and lets users add up to 16 GB by referring more users.
Amazon is working on an advertising platform to challenge Google’s dominance in the online ad market. Google currently supplies advertising to Amazon, and the company wants to gain that revenue for itself. Additionally, Amazon could place ads on other sites, using as a draw to advertisers its knowledge of its customers buying habits. Amazon also needs to expand its reach, and that is what offers like Prime Photos are designed to do.
Amazon’s shares are trading down about 1.2% early Tuesday at $302.02 in a 52-week range of $284.00 to $408.06.
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