Ring has a new mission. ‘Hey, there’s raccoons in my backyard’

Ring, Amazon’s doorbell company, is ditching crime fighting to become a smart-camera business with a cheery social-media side hustle. For years, Ring touted its crime-fighting bona fides, selling smart doorbells that let homeowners remotely monitor their residences — and sometimes share what they recorded with local police. Now the Amazon.com Inc. unit is looking to transform itself into a smart-camera business with a cheery social-media side hustle, sort of a mashup between Nextdoor and TikTok.

It’s a big strategy shift, and one that seems to be working so far. Ring “recently” became profitable, according to Chief Executive Officer Liz Hamren, thanks to a recurring stream of subscription revenue from people willing to pay as much as $20 a month to save and share videos captured by their devices.

About half of recent video doorbell buyers in the U.S. reported purchasing a Ring device, according to Parks Associates, which surveys buyers of smart-home devices. Ring is the largest smart camera maker and the second-largest seller of security systems, according to the researcher. The company has also made strides with its paid security monitoring services, which now trail only ADT Inc. in market share.

The company also suffered embarrassing security lapses, including attacks by hackers exploiting weak user passwords to hijack cameras and employees watching unencrypted user videos. Amazon paid $5.8 million to settled Federal Trade Commission charges related to those episodes, even as it denied violating the law. The company in recent years mandated more secure two-factor authentication for users and began offering end-to-end encryption.$5.

“It’s not about home control, it’s not about managing your home, it’s about what’s happening,” she said. “That’s like, ‘Hey, there’s raccoons in my backyard. Six packages got delivered. There’s three cars in your driveway.’”

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