Who Doused the Amazon Kindle Fire Demand?

Heading into the holiday season last year, everyone said that the Kindle Fire was going to be a huge draw, and it was. Now that we’ve had some time to recover from our new year’s hangovers, it seems that interest in Amazon’s cheap Android tablet is really starting to wane. Now, why would that be?

This comes from a report published by ChangeWave. In December, four percent of those surveyed said they were “very likely” to buy a Kindle Fire, but that figure has been cut in half to two percent in January. The “somewhat likely” crowd dropped from 13% to 10% over the same period.

Of course, this could be due to two very typical phenomena. First, demand for almost anything drops after the holidays. We’re all broke from all that shopping. Second, a lot of people really did buy the Kindle Fire over the holidays, so they obviously aren’t interested anymore in buying another one. To be fair, 54% of Kindle Fire owners are “very satisfied” compared to 49% of other tablets, though iPad owners still lead the pack at 74%.

The good news for Amazon, though, is that the Fire is doing exactly what it needed to do: offer kindling to ignite more purchases through Amazon. They say that 29% of Kindle owners are expected to spend more money at Amazon than they had before, compared to 19% of non-Kindle owners.