Amazon’s advertising business grew 18 per cent in the last quarter of 2024, lodging US$17.29 billion (AU$27.52 billion) in net sales.
This growth saw it outstrip Google’s advertising business, which grew 11 per cent in Q4. However, it fell short of Meta and Microsoft, with both seeing their ad businesses grow 21 per cent in the final three months of 2024.
Amazon’s ad growth has slowed over the last year and a bit. In Q4 2023, it notched 26 per cent year-on-year growth.
While advertising is becoming an increasingly important arm of Amazon’s business, it accounted for less than a tenth of the company’s overall sales, which grew 10 per cent to US$187.8 billion or nearly AU$300 million.
The festive shopping period is always a big quarter for the business that is still largely a retailer.
“The holiday shopping season was the most successful yet for Amazon and we appreciate the support of our customers, selling partners, and employees who helped make it so,” said Andy Jassy, President and CEO, Amazon.
“When we look back on this quarter several years from now, I suspect what we’ll most remember is the remarkable innovation delivered across all of our businesses, none more so than in AWS where we introduced our new Trainium2 AI chip, our own foundation models in Amazon Nova, a plethora of new models and features in Amazon Bedrock that give customers flexibility and cost savings, liberating transformations in Amazon Q to migrate from old platforms, and the next edition of Amazon SageMaker to pull data, analytics, and AI together more concertedly. These benefits are often realized by customers (and the business) several months down the road, but these are substantial enablers in this emerging technology environment and we’re excited to see what customers build.”
