Amazon’s AD business has reportedly grown faster than Google’s and Facebook’s every quarter for the past three years. While Amazon’s AD revenue is far smaller than the other two giants, it is growing much faster than Google and Facebook.
Amazon’s advertising business grew 25 percent in the third quarter to $9.5 billion. By contrast, Google’s AD revenue, which includes all Google-owned properties and YouTube, grew just 2.5% to $54.4 billion. Facebook’s advertising, which includes Instagram, shrank for the second quarter in a row, falling -3.7% year over year to $27.2 billion.
While Google and Facebook look much bigger right now, Amazon could eventually overtake them with its current run. In the third quarter of 2019, Facebook’s AD business was more than six times that of Amazon’s. Now, Facebook’s AD business is less than three times the size of Amazon’s. At the current rate of growth, when Facebook’s AD business is comparable in size to Amazon’s, it could grow only as fast as Amazon is expanding today.
In the third quarter, Amazon’s AD growth also outpaced social networks like Pinterest, Snapchat and Twitter (which don’t report Q3 results because they’re no longer public), but those three platforms are growing faster based on past growth rates. TikTok isn’t part of the comparison. It’s not publicly traded yet. TikTok’s advertising business is probably bigger than Twitter, Pinterest and Snapchat, and it’s the fastest-growing social network.
Amazon’s advertising revenues (now close to $40 billion a year, up tenfold in five years) have been helped by the change and expansion of its advertising range. The Amazon AD business, which began as a way to boost search rankings for sellers, now includes dozens of genres, technologies, data, and solutions for brands to reach consumers and, increasingly, for non-retail advertisers as well.
In recent years, Amazon has been looking to expand its advertising business in more diverse ways and technologies, in an effort to build its own economic ecosystem to compete with Google and Facebook.
Post time: Nov-03-2022