This is a jarring stat.
Amazon’s advertising business brought in $20B in 2020, which is more than the sales of Snap, Twitter, and Pinterest… combined.
While Amazon bundles its ad business under the category of “other,” leading tech analyst Benedict Evans teased out the number and shows it has doubled in just the past 2 years.
… which generated $386B total revenue last year. However, the majority of those sales are from the low-margin retail business.
Evans estimates that Amazon’s ad division could bring in operating income as high as $13.6B, which is in line with Amazon’s cash-cow cloud business.
According to CivicScience, ~50% of online shoppers start their product search on Amazon.
With all of these people to buy goods on its platform, Amazon is happily selling its digital real estate to the highest bidder.
Research firm Marketplace Pulse recently did a teardown of Amazon’s website — and the results were eye-opening. Everything shaded blue in the image below is an ad.
THAT is jarring!