Amazon's “other” sales, mostly comprised of its advertising revenue, jumped 139% to $2.03B in Q1, the first time sales have surpassed $2B
almost double what Wall Street expected Shareen Pathak / Digiday : Amazon advertising is now worth $2 billion Jason Del Rey / Recode : Amazon's AWS and advertising businesses are fueling its retail dominance Tweets: Jason Kint / @jason_kint : I continue to believe no one likes amazon advertising growth stories more than Google and Facebook as they attempt to deflect competition regulators questions. Math: $2B/qtr is still barely 5% of Google + Facebook. http://www.cnbc.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the moment Amazon's ad business stopped being a footnote. In February, Digiday flagged the 'other' line — mostly ads — at $1.7B for Q4 2017, small next to Google and Facebook but compounding far faster (growing 60% YoY). Three months later it cleared $2B for the first time, jumping 139% to $2.03B on nearly double what Wall Street expected.
The scale gap is still enormous — Jason Kint's math puts a $2B quarter at barely 5% of Google plus Facebook — but the trajectory is what matters, and Recode's Jason Del Rey frames AWS and ads as the engines funding retail dominance. The subsequent record confirms the arc: by 2022 Amazon was disclosing ad revenue separately at $9.7B a quarter (its first formal breakout), and by mid-2025 quarterly ad revenue reached $15.7B.
First-order effects
- Advertisers gain a credible third auction alongside Google and Facebook, one attached directly to purchase intent rather than browsing behavior — and Amazon's fastest-growing segment is now large enough to be reported and scrutinized on its own.
Second-order effects
- Google and Facebook face a two-front problem Kint names explicitly: a new competitor taking commercial-intent budget, just as they lean on Amazon's rise to deflect regulators' competition questions about their own duopoly.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, digital advertising restructures from a two-player market into three pillars — search, social, and retail media — with Amazon's disclosure cadence (from 'other' bucket to standalone line) tracking its climb toward parity.
The trend: Retail media is emerging as the third pillar of digital advertising, converting commerce data into an ad business that compounds faster than the search-and-social incumbents it siphons budget from.