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Technology Stocks : Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: david thor who wrote (33828)	1/9/1999 11:00:00 AM
From: wiz	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

David Generalizations are true in general!-g- I'm a musician, and I play stocks... Mark

To: david thor who wrote (33828)	1/9/1999 7:47:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

The Internet Capitalist SG Cowen Internet Research 8 remains, in our view, both a sweet victory and yet another nice data point to support our overall bullish thesis for the Net. Why Changing Consumer Behavior Is Key -Revisited As we spoke about in the last issue of The Internet Capitalist, we often find ourselves repeating a mantra of sorts about consumers; that if you have a product of service that can entice consumers to change the way they spend either their time or their money, then you're likely to create some substantial value with that product or service in time. This is the idea that, if you can cause a radical change in consumer behavior, you must be doing something awfully right. We've talked about Ebay's (the first Internet auction site) appeal in the past, but a front-page article in the Sunday Styles section (that's right, the Styles section) of The Sunday New York Times (1/3/99) brought Ebay's ability to change behavior into full relief. Go to www.nyt.com for a great (and somewhat frightening) view on how one becomes an Ebay addict. Company Watch America Online AOL Gets Added To The S&P 500 Having been asked “when's AOL going to be added to the S&P 500?” more times than “why is Amazon worth so much?” over the last 12 months, we greeted this announcement with as much glee as, apparently, retail investors did. We mention this announcement simply because it represents a watershed event for both the Internet and for AOL. Having watched this company grow up over the last four years (and watched the Internet grow up with it), the inclusion of AOL in the S&P index is nice vindication for years of optimism and bodes well for a future when the Internet is as vital to investors' understanding of the US economy and the US capital markets as the industrial companies that have historically constituted the index have been. Three cheers to the folks at AOL for their persistence in hoeing a long and hard road. 1.5+ Million New Subscribers During Q4. AOL announced on December 30 th that it had reached “more than” 15 million accounts for its domestic subscriber base. By our math, that's an addition of 1 million new subscribers since November 12 th , or more precisely, 21,000 new subscribers per day, well ahead of the 12,000 new subs per day they averaged during the first half of the December quarter. Reaching 15 million accounts means that AOL added something like 1.5 million new accounts (versus the previous all-time high last year of 1.2 million) in the December quarter, a new record for the company and evidence that AOL's momentum remains undaunted. Now for the really important part; at what cost did AOL add these new subscribers. For that data point, we anxiously await the S&M expenditure data when they announce Q4 results January 27 th . $1.2 Billion In Shopping Over The Holidays AOL also announced that it had been responsible for more than $1.2 billion in online holiday sales this season, suggesting that, if previous estimates for total online retailing hold, AOL could have captured almost half of all holiday online retail spending. The magnitude of this number, for those of us around when AOL was an online service for pimply geeks rather than a hip New Media company, almost induces awe. That said, the first question asked after the release was, “how much of that does AOL capture?” The answer is very difficult to arrive at given the complexities of how AOL structures the ad/commerce deals it enters into, but suffice it to say that our $160 million “ad/commerce revenue estimate (12% q/q) for AOL's Q4 is, as they say, in the bag.