Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Amazon released its fourth quarter earnings for 2019 today, and the company is touting big Prime subscriber numbers as one of the main contributors to a very successful holiday season. The company says it now has over 150 million Prime subscribers, and that more people joined Prime during the fourth quarter of last year than any other quarter in the company’s history. Since its last milestone of 100 million subscribers in 2018, more than 50 million people have joined.
It’s no secret that people subscribe to Prime, at least its monthly version instead of its annual one, more during the holiday season than at other times in the year, to ensure that gifts arrive for the holidays. But Amazon also attributes its particularly big swell of new…