Amazon’s Holiday PR is Just as Devoid of Facts as Always (Premium)

I often complain about Microsoft's aversion to hard numbers. Well, Amazon is even worse.

As you may know, Amazon crows about its great holiday sales success every single year. (Brad just wrote about this year's results.) But it does so without providing almost any hard numbers, to the consternation of those, like me, who wish to understand how well individual products and services are doing.

I just wrote about how intertwined Amazon's physical and virtual services are. So it's interesting to look at how Amazon has reported the same information about these same items in each of the past three years.
Every year is awesome
But notice how the language was even squishier in 2015.

2017: "Amazon celebrated its biggest holiday season with customers all around the world shopping at record levels."

2016: "This 2016 holiday was the best-ever season for Amazon."

2015: "Amazon’s 21st holiday was a record-breaker for Amazon Prime, Amazon Original Series, and Amazon devices."
Echo devices ... or many device types?
You will be forgiven for believing that Amazon has sold some number of millions of Echo appliances each of the past three years, given the quotes below. But note that "Alexa-enabled devices" actually includes Fire TV devices and Fire HD tablets too. What I do see in these quotes, however, is an escalation in sales in each year, of all three of these device types collectively. What's not clear, of course, is how many of each Amazon sells.

2017: "Tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices [were] sold worldwide."

2016: "Millions of Alexa devices [were] sold worldwide."

2015: "Millions of devices sold."
Best-selling products
Amazon devices are somewhat suspiciously the best-selling products on Amazon every year. The mix changes over time, however.

2017: "Echo Dot and Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote were ... the best-selling products from any manufacturer in any category across all of Amazon."

2016: "Echo and Echo Dot were the best-selling products across Amazon this year."

2015: "The all-new Fire tablet was the #1 best-selling, most gifted and most wished-for product ... on Amazon.com."
Amazon Prime
What's interesting here is how vague growth is. In both 2017 and 2015, Amazon actually mentioned some number of millions of people "joining" Prime in December, but that is clearly just for the free holiday shipping. One imagines that most of those new customers killed their subscriptions afterward. And when you look at the company's general comments about Prime, it's actually not that impressive.

2017: "Prime membership continued to grow this holiday ... in one week alone, more than four million people started Prime free trials or began paid memberships."

2016: "More people around the world tried Prime this holiday season than any previous year."

2016: "Amazon Prime membership continues to grow, and there are tens of millions of members worldwide. ... More than three million members worldwide join...