Amazon annual revenue

As Amazon's revenue has grown from merely enormous to genuinely incomprehensible, the US comic book and graphic novel market has tagged along with the quiet determination of an industry that knows it is riding someone else's rocket. The correlation is 0.955 across eighteen years, which is the kind of number that makes you wonder whether Jeff Bezos has a secret comic book collection, or whether Comixology—which Amazon bought in 2014—was not so much an acquisition as a prophecy. The superheroes fly, the revenue soars, and the scatter plot cannot tell the difference.

Amazon's revenue grew from 8 billion to over 575 billion between 2005 and 2022, swallowing retail categories the way a black hole swallows light. The comic book market grew from about 700 million to over 2 billion during the same period, driven by the Marvel Cinematic Universe (which turned obscure characters into billion-dollar franchises), the manga explosion (manga outsells traditional American comics roughly 3-to-1), and digital distribution. Amazon is actually a meaningful player in this specific market: its Comixology platform and Kindle ecosystem are major distribution channels, and its Prime Video content competes for the same audience. This is one of those correlations where the two variables are not entirely independent, which makes it less spurious than usual but no less entertaining.

Eighteen years of Amazon and comics growing together is a story about an economy where entertainment and retail are increasingly the same thing, sold on the same platform, to the same customer. The comics got bigger because the movies got bigger, and the movies got bigger because the economy got bigger, and Amazon got bigger because everything did. The heroes save the world; the revenue saves itself.