Long Seen as King of Commerce, Amazon is now the Prince of Content, as well. Amazon is gobbling everything in sight, growing through a mix of organic and inorganic moves

When I launched WatchMojo, rights holders had no economic incentive to embrace digital distribution.

Today, the landscape is unrecognizable, with traditional media companies changing their business models to embrace digital.

While the MGM acquisition – at $8.45B, it’s the second largest all time after Whole Foods – is more about bolstering its Prime unit by reducing churn, make no mistake about it, it sets up Amazon to expand its ad offerings, as well.

That $75B in TV ad spend won’t flow to SVOD environments like Prime, it will flow to AVOD platforms like YouTube. By getting so much content via MGM’s back catalog, and an impressive studio output, it can better compete with Facebook, Google/YouTube and Snap for ad dollars.

Indeed, using market comparables, Amazon’s $22.4B in advertising revenues projects Amazon’s ad business to be valued at $225B, below Google and Facebook but far larger than Snap, Pinterest, Twitter and Roku and others.