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Recent news suggests it's not for lack of trying that Alexa hasn't been monetized, and Amazon has started cutting staff as a result of the failure. People just want to buy the smart assistant, not a voice nag that tries to get them to buy more things without using their eyes. So selling devices at cost hasn't been working.

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So increase the price for new devices? Start charging a minimal subscription fee for new devices for more than 3 interactions per day?

They could just make less crappy devices. We love the concept and hate the implementation.

That won’t monetize it, though.

How could we know? They haven’t tried yet.

Because they need to raise prices or charge subscription fees in order to make money on it. Just making a better product without increasing prices is not going to change that they're losing billions per year on this.

I want to pay to not be the product. Especially when I purchase a product that can spy on me in my own home. They should obviously increase prices but my point is that haven’t tried to offer it. They’d rather subsidize it all with ads and not give their consumers a choice. They could offer an ad-free experience for more money if they wanted to. And still sell the existing products for the same price. But they haven’t tried yet.

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