How Amazon Built The World's Fastest Growing Ad Business
The definitive, inside story of how Amazon joined Facebook and Google as the internet's third dominant ad seller.
This week we begin a two part series on Amazon’s improbable rise as one of the world’s largest ad sellers. Journalist
tells us the story. - Alex KantrowitzBy Mike Shields
Amazon’s now-massive advertising business began with a sputter.
“Advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product or service,” Jeff Bezos once famously said.
But seeing the revenue potential in 2006, his executives reluctantly trudged toward the business. They were so ambivalent at first, they outsourced early chunks to Google and Yahoo. Their early ads didn’t always have links. And though Amazon was a massive ecommerce site, advertisers couldn’t tell if their ads led to purchases.
Today, nearly twenty years later, Amazon is an advertising juggernaut. Backed by a massive audience, reams of consumer data, and strong technological chops, the company pulled in $56 billion in advertising revenue in 2024, and another $13.9 billion in Q1 of this year.
Considering that Comcast’s NBCUniversal, which had a hundred year head start, brought in just north of $2.6 billion in ad sales last year, it’s fair to say that Amazon now runs the world’s greatest side hustle
The Duopoly — a term coined for Facebook and Google when they brought in 85 cents of every new digital advertising dollar— is officially dead.
Long live the Triopoly.
It all may seem obvious in hindsight (why wouldn’t a trillion dollar tech company crush it with ads?), but the company’s success was hardly guaranteed. And if not for a series of key decisions, it may never have happened.
Over the next two weeks, we’ll explore how the company built the fastest growing advertising business of all time.
Here’s how Amazon did it:
 | A guest post by
|