Amazon.com has reported financial results for its most recent quarter. Revenue rose an impressive 41% versus the same quarter last year, but perhaps more importantly, the company showed a lot of strength in areas beyond its direct-to-consumer ecommerce business.
Amazon’s S3 service now hosts more than 10 billion files, doubling in just the past six months. Meanwhile, an additional 25,000 developers signed up for the company’s web services program in the past quarter, bringing the total to 290,000. Additionally, sales from third-party merchants (aka, affiliates and people selling via Amazon’s web services) made up 32% of total sales. All of these factors point to Amazon diversifying its revenue, as well as in the long-run reducing the amount of money it spends on marketing as more people build applications that link into the company's huge product database and fulfillment capabilities.